Tag: reflection

Self-Reflection on Narrative Part 1

My reflection on this narrative writing process is that I felt strange doing freewriting by noticing things happening around me, because when I write, I’m not used to being aware of my surroundings. Doing that really allowed me to relax and focus more on how I feel and what I sense in the moment. I think it also helped me better recall my writing and reading experiences. I found that there is a connection between my ability to write now and my childhood experiences with reading and writing. I think many of my struggles with writing and reading came from my early childhood, and they were areas in which I lacked when I was younger. I think this sentence, “These moments taught me that growth in reading and writing is not a straight line. It curves, pauses, and sometimes restarts, but it moves forward when I keep practicing.” is the most interesting because it speaks to a lot of people, and many can resonate with the experience that sometimes things can be hard and you just have to be patient and learn to overcome the difficulties. I think this is true not only in writing but in anything else in life, too. As long as you are trying your best, you can achieve the things you want to do.

“The Overcast Summer” Reflection

When I first began writing The Overcast Summer, I brainstormed my most prominent reading moments. To be honest, there weren’t many. However, I realized that the overall change in how I view reading was something I could passionately write about. I remembered when summer reading was first introduced and how distraught I felt once I learned I had to do work over the summer. While writing this piece, I discovered that the change eventually made me enjoy reading. I also realized the impact Percy Jackson had on my reading journey while I was brainstorming for the page. I believe the most interesting sentence would be when i described first opening Percy Jackson and how my surroundings impacted me because of the description I used.

Literacy Narrative Reflection: Do I like writing?

My first literacy narrative is about my journey and formative experiences as a reader and writer. Without giving too much away, said experiences were not just school assignments but rather experiences that brought out important emotions and discoveries. The narrative is somewhat chronological as I think back to my first memories of reading and writing and then branch off into elementary, middle, and high school experiences.  The whole process was a series of new experiences. To start, in order to warm up for the narrative, I did a free writing assignment which was something I had never really done before. While a lot of the writing I pumped out in the warmup was sloppy, I was able to recall certain experiences so much more vividly and all they needed was a little bit of polishing. I thought of it as stretching before a basketball game. It’s sort of annoying and it would be more fun to get right into the action, but it really helps you flow and perform. I also found myself getting a little sentimental when having such vivid memories. Maybe it’s because I miss my family a lot and I’m pretty homesick but I felt back home for a little while when doing the exercises. The vividness of my memories that came up from doing the exercises definitely show up in my essay. The other new experience was the essay itself. I had never thought back to my experiences as a reader and writer before and I had also never written an essay in the style that I did. I wrote in a way that was somewhat loose and journalistic while still keeping in mind that it was for a class and needed to be submitted. As I wrote the essay, I put all my memories down onto paper and then analyzed how they affected my relationship with the skills. I thought about how the skills are taught in schools and why I thought about them negatively for so long. The essay helped me realize how much joy the skills had brought me in my life and how they also built my personality, teaching me how to feel different complex emotions. Writing the essay was a lot of fun for me. I found that it didn’t feel as hard or as daunting as most essays that length would usually be to me. I got to flow and put my thoughts down on paper without needing to think too hard. My final sentence was one that a lot of people would be intrigued by. The sentence was the concept of a chart with every reading and writing experience I had ever had and a scale to see how formative they were. Would the most memorable experiences be the most formative? An interesting question to ponder.
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Literacy Comic Reflection

Now that you’ve completed your Literacy Narrative Comic, publish a reflective blog post of about 500 words about the writing process, paying special attention to how the work you have done has helped you to meet the Learning Outcomes for this class. That post should link to the page with your literacy comic.

Some other questions you might respond to:

  • How was it different to write your literacy narrative as a comic?
  • How did you think differently once the visual component was added?
  • How did that help you to see the story you were trying to tell in different terms?
  • Was your analytical thinking process any different?
  • How have your thoughts about your alphabetic literacy narrative changed in the process of transforming it into a comic?

I’d also like you to discuss choices you made in creating your comic and to explain why you chose the way you did. Especially if there’s something you were really trying to do in your comic which you felt you couldn’t realize as perfectly as you would if you had a lot more time, more resources, or if you could have hired an illustrator to turn your vision into exactly what you wanted. If there are aspects of your comic where you have a clear sense of what you were trying to accomplish and how you would have done so if some things were different, then explain that in your reflection. Doing so allows you to demonstrate that you have the knowledge you need about this sort of writing even if you have not yet developed all the skills necessary to make that knowledge visible in the final artifact you’ve produced.

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Halfa Kucha Reflection

Due: Friday 12/2

Export your halfa kucha slideshow as a set of images (in Powerpoint: File > Export… and then in File Format select jpeg and “save every slide.” Powerpoint will create a subfolder where you tell it to and save each of your ten slides as images). Then in your WordPress dashboard create a new post and upload those images to a Slideshow block.

If you used Google Slides, you can embed the slideshow by going to File > Publish to the web and then selecting settings. It will give you an embed code that you can paste into an HTML block in your post.

Then write a couple of paragraphs reflecting on the process of writing and then giving the presentation. How was it different to construct an argument that you were giving to the class as a presentation than to write an essay? How did you make choices about the structure of your argument? If you made a choice to organize your presentation in a certain way so that your audience would follow it more clearly, is that something that you could also make use of in your written work? Was your analytical thinking process any different?

What decisions did you make about the visuals for your presentation? How did you go about creating an impact for the slides that accompany your spoken words?

What did you learn by giving this type of presentation, where you had no control of the timing of the slides and couldn’t put much in the way of text on your slides, as compared to other presentations you have given? What did you notice about your classmates’ presentations that you might think about incorporating into your own presentations in the future?

What do you think you could have done better in your presentation?

Halfa Kucha assignment prompt

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Tracing Stitches and Spinning Reflection

Once you have completed your Tracing project and published the pages to your site, you need to publish a reflection post as well. The post serves to turn the project in when it syndicates to the class site, and is also an opportunity for you to explain your process in the work you just completed.

Your reflection post should link to the main page for your project and also to the assignment prompt. Tell us in the post what the thesis of your essay is and give a one or two sentence preview of your argument.

You should also address the following questions:

  • Before writing your essay, you went through a pretty involved process of tracing and annotating two pages from the books. Briefly explain what that process was like for you — probably this was very different from most other writing you’ve done, so try to explain what was useful about the process for you. What productive thoughts or analysis occurred through the act of tracing and annotating?
  • For this assignment, I asked you to be very conscious of writing an inductive essay with an ABT thesis at the end, which is probably a pretty foreign way to structure an essay for you. How did your writing process change to address this assignment?
  • This assignment is a close reading exercise focused on identifying aspects of the “secret language of comics,” the series of choices the authors make in crafting comics that probably pass by many readers with little or no conscious notice. Do you feel that this assignment helped you to get in on this secret language? Do you understand Stitches and Fun Home better after having written this project? What’s the single biggest insight you gained about the two books during the process of tracing, annotating, and analyzing these pages (maybe something you “knew” on some level before you started but that you really get now, or maybe something you hadn’t really noticed until you worked on the project)?
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Literacy Narrative Comic Reflection

Now that you’ve completed your Literacy Narrative Comic, publish a reflective blog post of about 500 words about the writing process, paying special attention to how the work you have done has helped you to meet the Learning Outcomes for this class. That post should link to the page with your literacy comic.

Some other questions you might respond to: How was it different to write your literacy narrative as a comic? How did you think differently once the visual component was added? How did that help you to see the story you were trying to tell in different terms? Was your analytical thinking process any different? How have your thoughts about your alphabetic literacy narrative changed in the process of transforming it into a comic?

I’d also like you to discuss choices you made in creating your comic and to explain why you chose the way you did. Especially if there’s something you were really trying to do in your comic which you felt you couldn’t realize as perfectly as you would if you had a lot more time, more resources, or if you could have hired an illustrator to turn your vision into exactly what you wanted. If there are aspects of your comic where you have a clear sense of what you were trying to accomplish and how you would have done so if some things were different, then explain that in your reflection. Doing so allows you to demonstrate that you have the knowledge you need about this sort of writing even if you have not yet developed all the skills necessary to make that knowledge visible in the final artifact you’ve produced

Literacy Narrative Reflection

Once you have published your literacy narrative as a page on your site, you’ll need to also publish a post about the narrative that links to the page (how to add a link in a post or a page). That post serves three fundamental functions:

  • it provides a compelling preview of your narrative that summarizes your controlling idea in a sentence or two;
  • it reflects on what you have learned in the process of writing your literacy narrative;
  • when your post syndicates to the class site, that constitutes turning in your narrative.

Some questions to consider in your reflection:

  • What was your writing process for this narrative like? Did it feel strange for you to do the freewriting exercises first? How did the freewriting influence the essay you eventually wrote?
  • What did you learn about yourself by the end of writing your narrative? Was there anything that you found surprising, or something about yourself that you came to view differently in the process of writing this essay?
  • What sentence from your essay do you think someone else reading it would identify as the most interesting sentence? Why?
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Sketch 6: What’s in your bag?

Due: 10/7

Tag: sk6

Find a relatively large empty space. Take your backpack, messenger bag, or whatever sort of bag you carry around with you regularly, empty all the contents out, and arrange them carefully so that they represent a visual snapshot of the stuff you tote around with you on a normal day. If you have something in your bag that is private, embarrassing, or for some other reason you don’t want it in the picture then make the editorial decision not to include it. Or vice versa: if you would like to assume a certain kind of persona then you might consider including items in your catalog that might be less than fully true.

Take a clear photo showing your bag and the stuff and upload it to your site. Note that like the avatar or the literacy narrative, this too is a type of autobiographical composition.

Add some text to your post listing the items represented in your photo, preferably adding in a bit of explanatory and/or funny commentary along the way. This can be a paragraph of text or a list or whatever format seems most appropriate for you. When these sorts of posts are done by publications, like say The Verge or Timbuk2, they are often not so subtle efforts at product placement but for our purposes there is no reason for you to engage in such advertising games.

Along with the photo and your description of the items, include a paragraph reflecting on what it was like to craft a self-portrait through this photograph. How actually representative is this image of you as a person? What sorts of choices did you make in order to create the image? What was challenging about this assignment? Is representing yourself in a catalog of the stuff in your bag a type of writing? Why or why not?

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