Process Memo

Thaier Shaeena

Rinke

WRT 150

12 October 2012

Literacy Timeline

            While beginning my literacy timeline I started to think about my furthest memory of either reading or writing. Then I instantly began to think about all of the books I have read and that branched out to my first essay which lead me to remembering one of my first writing assignments. It was not that hard to get everything on paper because they were my own memories and I had vividly remembered them. One thing that really stuck out to me was how much of an impact my mother had on my literacy journey. I had realized this when I constantly started to mention my mother over and over plus all of the different ways that she had helped me. Not only was I thinking about all of the times that she had helped me, but also the amount of projects and papers I had written that included my mother somehow. Of course I had often thought about my mother and knew that she was a big part of my life. However, never have I sat down to think about all of the ways she has helped me become who I am today which would ultimately be the theme to my literacy narrative. All in all I would have to say that the experience of writing my literacy timeline have taught me to think thoroughly about all of the things that I have accomplished along with all of the people who were there for me at my disposal.

Literacy Narrative

            The way I narrowed down my thoughts was to think about some of the most important things that had happened to me while becoming literate. I took all of the most impacting literacy events and made a story bank, which consisted of multiple notecards. The way that I had narrowed down all of my thoughts that I had written on separate notecards was to put them in chronological order. After I had all of my accomplishments in chronological order I began to weave my entire from the story bank into one big story that flowed from one accomplishment to another. The only hard thing about this was that I had to find a way to make each story relate to one another. After I had my story and it was time for the peer review. I received great feedback from my peers. I did not have a complete rough draft; I had just had my notecards and my timeline on a document file. The peer review session greatly benefited my story because my partners had helped me make all of my small stories flow into one big story. I was thinking abut how to make my text into a video when I was making my timeline. However, when I was writing my timeline the fact that I had to use pictures did alter my way of writing somewhat. I tried to come up with events that I knew I could tie a picture to. For example, one event that I was considering leaving out was when my mother taught me the alphabet. The only picture I could tie to this event would be a picture of some letters. On the other had, this event was way too crucial to leave out of my narrative so I decided to keep it and put a picture of some letters in my slideshow.

Animoto Slideshow

            My partners never had the chance to choose fifteen sentences because I did not have the rough draft done in time. My partners told me that I should just choose the sentences that I had written down on my notecards, which explained each event briefly. I had chosen all of the sentences that explained different events throughout my timeline. It was extremely hard to type everything I wanted to say into a specified character limit. I spent most of the time on my video changing and re-organized many of my sentences. The way I dealt with this was to try and change the amount of letters and words but to keep my story straight and get out what I wanted to say without taking anything away. Another strategy of mine was to replace words with symbols such ad & instead of the word and. The way I had imagined my slideshow with the pictures was to complement the previous slide. I frequently used the cover of books to explain previous books that I had read and included in my slideshow. Because of the text limitations I had to make a plethora of slides and include separate pictures into each following slide, which. I found to be very annoying. However, what this did for me was it ensured the regular flow in my slideshow to stay consistent. Most of my pictures were from the web, which made it easy to clearly depict what I was trying to say. On the other had I still had some personal pictures that I thought would be somewhat helpful in defining who I truly am. The song that I chose for my slide show was Flashing Lights by Kanye West. I believe that this song helped cement the theme in my slideshow of evolution and evolving as a writer. The beat alone starts off with a mellow violin and 808 with a dash of a high-pitched piano key. Then the 808 kicks in and then the beat drops to a kick with a clap. What this beat helps communicate about my literacy is that I am evolving, just like the beat. After reading the comments on my video I wish I would have lengthened my video and worked more on my works cited page. I believe that I could have added a bit more in my literacy journey to even further my story and could have possibly gotten a higher grade.  However, I do feel that I have successfully narrated my literacy over the years in a very easy way for an array of audiences to understand.