Literacy Memo

Andrew Rehling

WRT 150

Rinke

October 11, 2012

Literacy Narrative Process Memo

           

            When I first began thinking about my timeline to help develop my narrative, I thought that it would be appropriate that I started with some of the books I read when I was a lot younger and I tried to think back as far as I could with some of these books. Now thinking back to something I liked or had trouble reading 13 years ago isn’t always easy. I sorted through quite a few major books or other things that I read. What came to my mind almost immediately were the books in the I Spy series. I read other books at the time, but there were no other books I enjoyed more than those. With the I Spy books came back other memories that involved them, such as having my mom help me read them for the first time, how I always wanted to go to the library to check them out and read through all of them, how I brought them into my preschool or kindergarten classes, or even the I Spy CD-ROMs that were available at the library, I only picked a couple of these memories for my narrative that were the most relevant to topic. I knew that talking about I Spy wouldn’t be enough to fill the required amount of time, and it would also get kind of boring after a while, so I thought about readings I might have had trouble with and what came to me was the time I had struggled to read a Superman comic book. Now back when I was 3-6 years old ago, I was a huge fan of Superman. It was my favorite Halloween costume and TV show to watch at the time, so when I saw a superman comic book at Toys R Us, I knew I had to have it. All I liked about it at first were the pictures and different action shots. I knew it was a story but I couldn’t figure out what it was unless I actually read it. Then I began to recall my memories of struggling to read my read comic book by myself due to how the pictures and speech bubbles were formatted on the pages. I wasn’t anything that I was used to, so I thought that all these details would be interesting to talk about along with this literacy experience.

            At first I was going to connect these experiences based on the fact that were involved with a few types of hobbies or interests that I had, but that idea seemed a bit too vague, so as I began thinking on these two topics I realized that what helped me develop literacy was my interest in pictures and how I made connections between the pictures and the words on the pages. I didn’t really make this connection at first but it makes sense now figuring out what my motivation was to actually sit down and make attempts at reading. The connection between pictures and words and creating a motivation for me became my central theme for the paper that I addressed a little bit in my introduction and recapped on it in my conclusion and because of some of these memories I focused on, it wasn’t hard to explain or pick this theme. The creation of my timeline helped me realize that the relation between pictures and words was a big part of my developing literacy.

            I narrowed down my narrative by the two biggest points of my timeline which were the I Spy books and the Superman comic. It wasn’t hard and very straight forward as far as my thinking went and I didn’t have much on my timeline to work with in the first place. The whole concept of relating words and pictures came to me shortly after the idea of starting my narrative talking about the large role I Spy books had played as a child. When I began writing up my narrative, I just used a chronological order to the events that I had discussed. I found that it would be easier and a lot more organized if I did it this way and didn’t just idea-hop all over my timeline piece fragments of the complete ideas together. It wasn’t too difficult drafting up my ideas. I just wanted to keep focusing on little ideas without getting too repetitive or having the paper sounding too dry and boring. Probably the only pre-writing strategy that I had used before drafting or even making my timeline was a little bit of brainstorming that I did in my head. Now, I’m not sure if it’s considered brainstorming if I don’t write it down; I have never been a fan of writing my ideas down before I start a paper unless I was afraid that I was going to forget about them, but I kept a few key ideas in mind and while I wrote them down on my timeline, the ideas that I was almost certain that I was going to use in my paper or that had the most relevance to one other, I would putt more in detail down about those, so there would be paragraphs on ideas that I really liked and just a sentence or two and ideas I thought about including, but ultimately did not use. In a way, I thought of the creation of my timeline as a prewriting technique to sort of reference back to in case I did get lost, or if I did forget a detail or two.

            After the peer review I realized how others have similar literacy origins as me, but what they did was included almost their entire timelines, whereas I only focused on two specific events in my childhood. Others where on to reflect back to hobbies and interest just as I was going to do with my draft and talked about their outcomes of how they are present day because of growing up reading or how they felt about reading. I never even thought once about touching base on how I am today because of this reading materials and developing literacy… Heck, I didn’t even make it past the age of six in my draft. Thoughts popped up in my head wondering if I talked about enough or did I address too little in my draft. I didn’t get much criticism for my paper. Mostly the transitions weren’t really there and there a few sentences where words were jumbled up, or thoughts were incomplete; that’s all. During the final edits, I already had a good idea what sentences I was going to use in my slideshow, it was all a matter trimming out minor details and I already kind of did that in my head when I was reviewing my draft.

            Out of the 15 chosen sentences that were highlighted in my draft, I chose maybe seven or eight of those. No offense to Jake, but It seemed like he picked the sentences that sounded really good or cool, but if condensed down to summarize my paper it would make for a weird flowing idea or concept. I sorted through the sentences and referred back to the ideas throughout the draft and didn’t really pick the greatest details given, but the sentences that would complete my idea with a great understanding of what my draft was about. It was hard meeting character limits for the text slide, I down right hated those; and my strategy?  Write like a kindergartener.  Try not to describe if you couldn’t and keep everything as simple as possible. My image were like a nice little break from reading the simple text slides and kept a nice relation with the point I tried to get across while keeping attention with the detail of imagery, and also everyone love pictures of you as a kid (especially if you’re dressed up like Superman). Most of my images were personal because I feel those are the best. My song was a slow, easy going song that may not have a large effect but helped keep the tempo and pace of the slideshow. It helped communicate that my literacy was a slow process much like the song used.

            What I would’ve done differently would be to cover less ground and try to expand more with my timeline and add more events to my literacy development. I’m sure that there’s more that I could think if I thought about it hard enough. I would try to make it less dry and clean up the details and take out those that do not significantly help prove my point.