Literary Narrative Reflection

Dennis Lin

Professor L. Rinke

Composition I

12 October 2012

Process Memo

As I sat down in class to begin writing my literacy timeline, I knew the most logical place for me to begin is my birthplace. I did not have a hard time remembering details since I remember clearly how my life begin in Boston not knowing any English and Chinese was the first language that I begin to interact with my family. It was definitely hard to get everything on my paper since there is so much to life as I’m going through a lot of changes as each year goes on. Something that is interesting I realized about my literacy development while composing my timeline that I had never previously thought of is that while I was attending school in Taiwan, they actually taught me basic English in an optional class that I took when I was in the 3^rd grade. ESL was the main theme throughout my timeline and I focused on the books that I love to read. I decided that ESL was the area to focus on for my narrative since it is a new beginning when I came here and it was the turning point of my life as I begin living as an Asian-American. It was difficult to pick ESL as my only theme since my literacy developed even more during my times in middle school and high school. The experience of creating a timeline tells me that my I been through so much changes and college is a fresh new start to it in order for me to potentially reach the success I want to have in life.

I narrow down my area of focus for my written narrative in my times in the ESL as it is where all my English literacy development all started. It wasn’t that difficult for me to center my thoughts into a clear, straightforward story since I remember most of the things I did in the ESL program that guided me to become a better reader and writer. When I began to write my narrative, I organize it through the memorable things that I did in the ESL class. I wrote most of the things I did in the ESL in a chronological order. It was difficult to organize my thoughts into a draft at first since I did not thought I would find the old pictures that was taken during my ESL time but it turns I did find some pictures that I can write and make a video about. The kind of pre-writing strategy that I use are organizing the things I did in the ESL in the correct order of events and try to find the pictures to it before I start organizing which one happens first and before. After composing my rough draft, the kinds of things I change after the peer review was my grammar and some of the things I wrote to make it in a chronologically order. My partner was helpful as “another set of eyes” since they were able to find grammar mistakes and suggestions that how I could make change to the sequence of the paper. The kind of constructive criticism she gave me was try to focus on the events I did in the ESL and leave out the things I did in middle school and high school. It was very helpful since focusing on the ESL is actually a much better way to write my paper and create my video for it. When I made the final edits to my narrative, I was already thinking about how it was going to turn the story into an Animoto video slideshow since I needed to write about the old ESL pictures that I could still found in my house. This alter the way I would normally write a story because I wrote most of the things I did in the ESL based off of the pictures that I could found and pieced them together so that way I can write better and in a chronological order.

My peer review partner did not actually choose fifteen of my best sentences in my opinion since my partner actually chose the ones that I did not have the real pictures for the Animoto video. I choose some passages for my slideshow but most of them were included in my video. I find it extremely difficult to edit my text down or the 52-character limit per slide because I had to shorten my sentences and I feel like some of them were fragment sentences that I just couldn’t help it but to keep it. My strategy was to keep the original ideas of the sentences I chose and shorten it with another word or use “&” instead of “and” for most of my sentences. I use old images to work as a buffer between my text slides since it is much easier to tell a story that way if there are real pictures of my time in the ESL. They were used as a way to provide more detail because of the 52-character limit text limitations. I choose the images I used because they the pictures that when I was a young child in the ESL and there were pictures of the assignments that I did in the class. Some of the pictures I used were from the web since I couldn’t find the real picture of it and a better way to show it. They help me to tell my story since a picture is worth a thousand words. As the more pictures you see, the more you can experience the literary part of my life. The song I chose helped me to cement a theme in my slideshow because it is a song made by Eminem about the changes that I had to overcome. I chose this song because I have gone through a lot of changes like moving to different location and every change eventually comes down to me becoming the literate person I am today. It helps me to communicate about my literacy since instrumental and hook reminds my viewers that I went through a lot of changes in order to get to the point where I am at today. After going back to my video and watching it again, I feel like I wish I would have done differently on some of the text slides that have typos and some of it could have been reworded so it’s clearer for my viewers to understand. Overall, I thought I created a successful literacy timeline, narrative essay, and Animoto video on how I become the literate reader and writer I am today.