I recreated the “Here’s Johnny!” scene in The Shining. The most challenging part was to get my facial expression right. I asked a friend to judge my expression and take the photo.

I recreated the famous “What’s in the box?” scene from the movie “Se7en” or “Seven”. This is the scene when David Mills discovered what is in this mysterious box. I don’t want to spoil the movie, but when I first noticed that what is actually in the box, I was completely shocked. This movie gave me the sense that the justice side will not always win. I used a plastic pipe for the gun, and I invited my friend to be detective William. This one of the best movies that I’ve watched, and I really recommend it to those who are into crime movies. https://mikebest.me/blog/looking-back-the-cinematography-of-seven

My trilogy of literacy narrative projects has helped me understand my purpose for reading and has also led me to discover new ways of reading. I’ve learned that words are not the only way to understand a piece of literature; the combination of words and images can be an extremely powerful way to receive the author’s main ideas and messages. I feel like my first literacy narrative focused on how to turn words into images so that I could better understand the text. But after completing my comic and reading so many graphic memoirs and novels, I began to focus more on the interaction between words and pictures, and how we, as writers, can use that combination to communicate our message to readers. Now I see that the story I’m trying to tell is not just “comics helped me learn to read,” but something bigger: I’m really arguing that different forms of literacy should be valued equally, especially for people like me who don’t fit the traditional idea of a “good reader.” Before, I focused mainly on the events in my life—hating “pure reading,” discovering Diary of a Wimpy Kid and manga, and taking ENGRD 101. After making the comic and then returning to the essay, I started to see my story more as a critique of the idea that only long, text-only books count as “serious” or “real” literature. Panels, Pages, and a New Way to Read

For this assignment, I recreated the scene from Aquaman where young Aquaman is in the aquarium and discovers his ability to communicate with sharks and other sea creatures. I chose this scene because I recently visited the Georgia Aquarium and was amazed by the fish and the different species I saw. It immediately reminded me of Aquaman—even though it is not my favorite movie—because the Georgia Aquarium felt so realistic and visually similar to the special effects in the film. One challenge I faced was that my clothes and hairstyle were obviously different from what appears in the original scene, and instead of a shark swimming toward me, a bat ray approached. Overall, I really enjoyed the process; it was creative, fun, and a great experience.

After turning in the first part of my literacy narrative, I liked the idea I had written about, but I felt like something was missing. Before writing, I knew there was something significant about this trip to my grandparents’, but I didn’t really know what it was. Through this process, I learned a lot about myself from my writing processes to my personal feelings. The comic was important in this writing process because it allowed me to take time to consolidate my thoughts and really focus on what was important. That ended up being the overall theme of freedom to choose. The comic was also important because it allowed me to take a step back and think about what I wanted to get out of the moment, and it wasn’t until I took that time to reflect that I was able to truly understand what it meant to me. After completing the third part of my narrative, the story is much clearer. At first, I just had an idea, and even though the moment felt impactful, I didn’t really know why. I now feel that I have a good understanding of what this moment meant to me, and that’s because I was able to take time to digest what this trip truly represented.

How has the entire literacy narrative project helped you to meet the Learning Outcomes for this class? The entire literacy narrative project helped me realize that to create a nice writing piece it’s important to be able to synthesize it, connect it, and design, whether that’s visually or mindfully. The first paper allowed me to connect my ideas using the ABT Thesis style, the second allowed me to design my idea on a graphic scale, and finally, I was able to synthesize both my first essay and it’s graphic version for my final essay form. How was it to return to the alphabetic literacy narrative after having created your comic? How did you think differently after having worked in the visual medium and now returning to a text narrative? It was slightly different, in the sense that I had to concise my ideas because I realized I had a lot of filler information. After working in the visual medium and now returning to a text narrative, my focus shifted to consising my ideas.
How do you see the story you are trying to tell in different terms now? Was your analytical thinking process any different? The way I see the story I was trying to tell remains the same and the only change in my thinking process was that I became focused on synthesizing my thoughts.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
The alarm clock pierced the quietness of our apartment at 6 AM, dragging my mom out of sleep before the sun rose. Within seconds she was shaking me and my siblings awake, her voice snapping us out of our sleep as she hurried us to shower, get dressed, and gather our things. By 7 AM, the four of us stood in a line by the front door, waiting for our daily swipe of baby oil on the face and our family prayer. Then we walked the ten minutes to Success Academy Bronx 2 — a school known not just for academics, but for its strictness, intensity, and obsession with early mastery, especially in reading and writing. Those mornings mirrored what Success Academy demanded from its students: discipline, punctuality, and perfection. Reading and writing were treated like non-negotiable duties, not creative or emotional experiences. To me, literacy became just another routine I had to survive. At Success, the pressure to master reading and writing was an everyday thing. Daily reading logs, complex writing assignments, and — worst of all — the random reading tests. At any moment, a teacher could pull you from class and sit you down with a leveled book. The alphabet became a ranking system: A through Z. You had four years to reach Z, or you wouldn’t be promoted to middle school. Those stakes shaped the way I saw literacy: as a test of worth. Every time I was pulled out for an assessment, I felt like I was being judged not just on pronunciation or fluency, but on whether I was “good enough” for Success Academy’s standards. Reading became a race, something to conquer quickly so I would not fall behind. My relationship with reading and writing started to shift when I finally stepped outside of the expectations I grew up knowing. One of the first major shifts happened when I joined a summer debate program. For the first time, reading wasn’t about speed but instead it was about understanding. I had to research, annotate, and break down articles so I could build arguments and prepare for rounds. Writing became purposeful. Instead of following a rubric, I was crafting arguments meant to persuade people. Debate taught me that writing could be a tool, not a performance for teachers, but a way to communicate ideas and make people listen. Another important shift happened when I joined an Afrobeats dance group. Even though dance isn’t reading or writing in the traditional sense, it taught me that expression has rhythm. I began realizing that storytelling didn’t always need words — and that good writing, just like good dancing, has flow. Looking back, the key experiences that shaped how I read and write are discipline, defiance, and rhythm.
Success Academy gave me the discipline — the foundation of practice and routine — but it also made literacy feel rigid and stressful. Debate pushed me to question that rigidity and helped me discover purpose in reading and intention in writing. And Afrobeats taught me that expression has movement, whether through dance or through words on a page. Together, these experiences transformed my relationship with literacy. Reading is no longer something I do for survival, and writing is no longer something I do to avoid getting something “wrong.” They have become tools for expression — ways to think, communicate, and create meaning.

Click here to access the essay This project allowed me to express a similar idea in different mediums, specifically comic and alphabetical. I was able to experience the different constraints and possibilities that comes with the new medium. The comic was also a way for me to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of my first draft. I was able to assimilate that experience and produce a better essay. When I looked over my original draft again, I found some flaws. The most important one is that the essay seemed out of focus and everything is not connected together by a main argument. When I made my literacy narrative into a comic, I realized that the continuous flow of thought is very important, even if its a essay instead of a story. A break in logic is more apparent visually than in words. In this newer draft, I treated it if as I am telling a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Before I was just kind of listing the experiences I had with writing, now I am able to tell it in a more logical order with a better understanding of the causations. For example, when I was writing part 3, I asked myself: “how did speed become so important in writing” and “why was it stressful”. With these in mind, I tried to establish clear connections between sections.

This literacy narrative has helped me mostly with visual thinking and my writing process. As I’ve been creating this piece, I’ve been writing with the intention of eventually turning it into a comic. That means I’ve had to think about how my words will translate into drawings and short blurbs, and how to visualize what I’m trying to say. This process has really pushed me to think differently about storytelling and how I communicate ideas.

It was definitely hard to return to work that I had already spent so much time on, but my approach was different this time. After creating the comic, I started thinking more about how my writing could eventually be turned into images. I tried to keep that in mind as I revised, making sure not to add too much unnecessary detail and focusing instead on what could be clearly visualized later. I see the story I’m trying to tell now more like a summary with specific details about my journey learning how to read. During this revision process, I made sure to include more about my present self and how I look back on these experiences now. My analytical thinking was a bit different too, I focused more on the bigger picture and what the story means, not just what happened.

The project as a whole greatly improved my understanding of how storytelling techniques work with one another. Making the comic changed the way I wrote about certain scenes and descriptions when I was writing the initial version. Many of the minor details I wrote about were filler and made the piece less cohesive, which making the comic helped me see. Because each panel in the comic had to depict a distinct action or emotion, I wanted to tighten the rhythm and concentrate only on the moments that truly mattered and added to my piece. That made it easier for me to determine what was crucial to the narrative and what I could leave out. After creating the comic, switching back to the written version was much quicker than the first time. The comic served as a useful writing strategy that helped me critique my own writing.