The Secret Language of Comics

Track List:

1. Take Me Home, Country Roads — John Denver
2. Sleep Well — d4vd
3. Rock Your Body — Justin Timberlake
4. Bad Luck — BoyWithUke
5. Stronger — Kanye West
6. Annihilate — Metro Boomin
7. Spot Theme Epic Version — Carameii
8. Life Goes On — Oliver Tree
9. We Didn’t Start The Fire — Billy Joel
10. Don’t Stop Believin’ — Journey
11. All I Do Is Win — DJ Khaled
12. We Are The Champions — Queen
13. Sleep Well — d4vd

Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5PVtVuI7T3Bgk6eb3RFrN5?si=464be03ed9144318, the mixtape cover is a photo of the team that was taken after winning the tournament.

This past weekend, the Barkley Forum at Emory competed in the largest debate tournament of the fall semester: the Franklin R. Shirley hosted by Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. Because of the long road trip to and from Wake Forest, as well as constant self-prescribed music breaks during the more anxiety-inducing moments of the debate competition, music was a large part of the trip. The playlist I created consists of not only music that I enjoy, but also tells a story of how the debate trip went:

Starting off with Take Me Home, Country Roads (1971) by John Denver, the trip begins with a trip across the east coast — a first for me, who lived in Taiwan. Although I was excited for what I could see on the highways, I quickly realized that there wasn’t anything more than a mildly interesting billboard to keep me entertained. This made me understand that the quickest way for me to pass time was to sleep through the trip and catch up with the sleep debt I accrued the week before — a sentiment that I felt was captured in Sleep Well (2023) by d4vd.

After an uneventful and exhausting drive, check-in process, and below-average sleep, I surprisingly woke up with the energy to see the first day of the competition through to the end with the ambition and passion of Justin Timberlake’s Rock Your Body (2002). However, I was quickly struck with bad luck (a reference to Bad Luck (2021) by BoyWithUke), as our first opponent was one of the teams that were expected to win it all. The debate itself was as expected: we got crushed. However, I didn’t let that deter me from moving on with the day, knowing from Stronger (2007) by Kanye West that what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

The next two rounds went very well, going two-for-two. I felt in my zone, like Spiderman felt as Annihilate (2023) by Metro Boomin played in the background. However, in the last round of the day, disaster struck as we were presented with yet another difficult opponent. As we needed to win at least three rounds on the first day, my heart sank as though Spot’s Theme (2023) was playing in the movie theatre, and I knew that something bad was going to happen (spoiler alert: we lost).

With the first day done, I knew that there was nothing we could do about the undesirable pairings. I knew that life goes on (a reference to Life Goes On (2021) by Oliver Tree), and that was the mentality I held coming into the second day. After all, our coaches made it clear that the tournament wasn’t over until the last one of us gets knocked out of the tournament.

Like Billy Joel tells us in We Didn’t Start the Fire (1989), it’s up to us to continue fighting on. Like a montage scene straight out of a movie, the enthusiasm everyone had on the second day resembled the cheesy yet uplifting tune of Don’t Stop Believin’ (1981) by Journey. The first round of the day was the sweet sixteen, yet it seemed as if our senior was out for blood as they won round after round after round (a reference to All I Do Is Win (2010) by DJ Khaled), eventually reaching the final round.

We won that finals debate! It would be criminal for me to use any song except We Are The Champions (1977) by Queen to describe how elated the whole team was. With the tournament over and the trophy on the bus, there was nothing else to do but bask in victory and sleep well (a reference to Sleep Well (2023) by d4vd) knowing that the trip was a success.

Throughout the entire literacy narrative project, I thought about my writing as a process. I did multiple drafts and revisions to get to the final product. I used the writing center as a tool throughout the process to help where I lacked. I was also able to compose texts in a different mode, such as a comic and in alphabetical text.

After finishing the comic and returning back to the alphabetic literacy narrative, I was able to expand on my essay. With my first paragraph, the feedback I received was about my vagueness and how I needed to use certain example to show my readers how my experience was. My thought process was to explain as much I could without the visuals. For instance with the comic I used visual and less explanation to show how my experience was. In the alphabetical, I used more explanation to substitute the visuals that are missing. It was interesting doing both alphabetic and comic style. I got to see my writing come to life and share piece of my story with my audience through visual components.

I continued the same structure I used in my first draft. Starting from coming to America/elementary school, middle school, high school, and current life.

It was in the 4th grade when I first came to America from Ethiopia.I attended a predominantly white school with a majority of ignorant kids who questioned if I could speak English or not. Being one of the only students to not speak, read, or write in English was very intimidating. I hated the idea of bringing any more attention to myself because I already stood out by being one of the five students who were of color. I used to sit in class wondering about how great America would be, the education I would receive, all the new friends I would make, and so on. All the time I spent fantasizing about my future home was crushed when I stepped into a classroom where I couldn’t find any other kids who resembled me. My teacher, Ms.Nelson, constantly pressured me to speak aloud to the entire class, solely for her amusement in hearing my distinct accent .She would use me as an example to teach the kids that if that didn’t practice they would eventually become like me. Consequently, from that day forward until my time in middle school, I refrained from acquiring skills in reading, writing, and speaking English within an educational setting.

 However, I never stopped practicing outside of school. My love of writing never faded away completely; I just avoided practicing in class to avoid being bullied. I spent countless hours practicing reading and writing until I felt I had mastered it. I used writing as a way to express myself easily because I found it hard to speak in English. I practiced every day until 6th grade and that’s when I felt comfortable enough to start getting out of my shell. I even started to sign up for writing and poem competitions. Despite the fact that I never fully committed to the competitions because of fear, little Kidist would have been pleased  for having the bravery to sign up. However, the process of learning to read was very challenging due to my lack of knowledge of the alphabet, grammatical conventions, and vocabulary. It wasn’t until middle school when I started to learn more about grammar, sentence structure, and so on. Regardless of this development, procuring resources like books, computers, notebooks – vital tools for practice – remained a challenge for me. I constantly found myself at the library watching random “How to pronounce English words” youtube videos and repeatedly reading one of my favorite children’s books, The Very Busy Spider.

 Yet, when I began high school I started to lose my passion for writing. With the gradual disappearance of my heavy Ethiopian accent and the nurturing companionship of understanding peers,I felt more at ease in my social group. It eventually caused me to abandon the craft that had formerly provided me great joy.  Although this was when I gained proficiency with the language and felt confident, I stopped using writing as an escape. I began viewing writing as a chore rather than a way to express myself. Trying to balance school work, writing supplements, and my personal statement, I was tired of writing.I discontinued journaling because it began feeling like an assignment rather than something I could do to destress or for my pleasure. I was constantly hitting the burnout stage and having to force myself to write and write just to complete the assignment. Often feeling discouraged, I began to stop writing for fun and only when necessary for school. 

Even to this day ,the true stance of my relationship with writing and reading is uncertain. I’ve overcome this big obstacle that hindered me from learning, but does it necessarily mean that I have to enjoy writing and reading because I finally understand how to? As future semesters unfold in my college years, I anticipate my journey with writing and reading to grow as it is an essential part of being a student. While I’m unsure of how my growth will change my opinion of reading and writing, I hope I gradually regain that passion I once had in middle school. 

Mixtape

This is a mixtape where songs include the lyric “sorry.” As I was first diving into this assignment, I couldn’t think of a rhetorical situation my mixtape so I followed one of the examples of findings songs that include a word. I thought using one word like “sorry” would be too easy so I added an additional rule of songs that I’ve heard before.

My album cover inspiration comes from my dorm room. Many of the songs I listened to were about apologizing to someone and I thought gambling, or poker chips could represent the regret that people had.

Link to Literacy Narrative Pt. 3

The literacy narrative project has encouraged me to think critically about my personal experiences and how to convey them effectively through different mediums. I was better able to meet the Writing as a Process learning outcome because the literacy narrative was split into three parts. After writing my first draft, converting it into a comic helped me visualize exactly what I was trying to express and understand which parts of my essay were unnecessary. That way, when it came time to turn it back into an alphabetic narrative, I knew what revisions and edits needed to be added to make my essay more cohesive. Rearranging my writing into the comic medium also helped me meet the Visual Thinking learning outcome. The visual format of the project meant I was required to experiment with different ways of arranging my narrative so it would convey the ideas outlined in my first draft.
Returning to the alphabetic literacy narrative, I understood that several portions of my writing needed to be re-written, especially towards the end. I didn’t feel a need to change much from the first half of my essay, where I described reading and writing from childhood to middle school, but the comic gave me insight into the significance of those events. I realized instead of focusing on re-reading or returning to the enthusiasm for reading I once had as a kid, the true importance of being in my junior year English class was that it allowed me to reflect on my mentality towards reading and writing. That’s how I came to see my story in a different way; I understood how to get to the heart of how the evolution of my attitude has shaped the way I read and write.

This literacy narrative project has been different from any other writing assignment I have had in english classes, due to the fact that I have never had to write a comic before. Writing alphabetically and in comic form with the same storyline proved to be challenging but fun. Having the ability to see other students’ work was also extremely helpful for my learning in the writing process. I liked how we started off writing alphabetically because that was what I was most familiar with. Turning the alphabetic style into a comic was the most difficult part for me because I struggled to fit the entirety of my alphabetic narrative into the comic effectively. When I transformed the alphabetic narrative into a comic, I realized how choppy my narrative was. Seeing the narrative in visual form allowed me to realize and acknowledge what changes I needed to make to my narrative to make it more cohesive. My comic was more like a photo collage than a comic, so I made an active effort to make my alphabetic version more story-like. I was glad that the third part of the process was to go back to the alphabetic and make revisions. Critiquing each other’s storyboard was an interactive way to learn throughout the process, as well as having access to everyone’s website and being able to see each other’s work. Along with never creating a comic before this class, I had never made my own website before. This class and this project has helped me learn how to create and utilize my own website, which will most definitely be extremely helpful in the future. After going through all three stages of the process, I see my narrative differently than I did before. Originally I was attempting to tell the story from the beginning of my life up to this current point in time. After going back, however, I connected the end of my narrative to the beginning in order to have more synthesis and conclusion.

If you flip through my elementary school yearbook, there is a series of pages with photos of each fifth grade graduate lined up in neat boxes. Under the photos, there are a few fun facts about each student; one being what they want to be when they grow up. While most of my peers aspired to be an astronaut or a lawyer, I had a different passion that I pursued throughout elementary school. When you land on my box, you will find an eleven year old girl in a bright purple sweater with the caption: “I want to be an author when I grow up”. 

On one of the first Christmases I can remember, I recall tearing open a gift from Santa to find a “make your own book” kit. Little did I know that this very kit would be the catalyst for my aspirations to be an author. The kit contained sheets of paper and markers to write and illustrate a story. That very day, I wrote and illustrated my first book: “Family Trip to the Zoo”. The story describes a family of four taking a trip to the zoo, the main character being my aunt Keara. I submitted the writing and illustrations, and in a few short weeks I received a hardcover version of my story. Over the course of my elementary school years, I wrote and illustrated a total of five books; which you can still find tucked in my bookshelf at home. My aunt holds the title of favorite relative, and I devoted four out of five of my stories to her – one being more centrally focused on her daughter. Aunt Keara has her own copies of each book, and would encourage me to write a sequel after receiving each new story.

As the years passed through middle school and into high school, my books collected dust on my shelf. My passion for reading and writing slowly faded into the background, as school and basketball took hold of my focus. It wasn’t until my first heartbreak that sparked up my passion for writing once again. My first break-up occurring in my junior year of high school snuck up behind me and knocked me out. In the midst of the messy ending, I sobbed for weeks on end; physically unable to eat, sleep, or function. I desperately needed closure, which he was unwilling to provide. I sent him paragraph after paragraph, with no response in return. I realized my desperation was only pushing him further away, and that I needed to find closure on my own. In a moment of hopelessness, I resorted to journaling. Every time I wanted to text, call, or reach out, I would write everything I wanted to say to him in my journal. Flipping through my journal entries is the epitome of an emotional rollercoaster. One entry will be beautifully written, reminiscing on how “perfect” our relationship was and how I would do just about anything to get him back, while the next entry would be written in all capital letters about how horrible he treated me and made me feel. No matter how tempted I was to send him these entries, I held my ground and kept them to myself. The more I wrote, the better I felt. Eventually, I no longer depended on my journal or felt suffocated by the urge to reach out. We broke up at the beginning of May of my junior year, and my last entry was July 21st. The irony of it all is that a few months later, he reached out to me begging for me back and apologizing for everything he put me through. Unfortunately for him, by then I had moved on and soon after met someone new. Healing is a process, and without utilizing writing as an outlet, I am unsure as to whether or not I would have made it through.

Starting that very summer (the summer of my breakup), my mom hired me to tutor my younger brothers in English. She paid me twenty dollars an hour and posed the tutoring sessions as distractions from my emotional distress. While I grew up with a natural passion for reading and writing, my brothers struggled with finding the same motivation. I created lesson plans consisting of basic reading comprehension, grammar, and writing. Conducting these lessons contorted my vision as a writer, due to the fact that I had the lens of an instructor rather than a student. Creating the lesson plans and teaching my brothers led me to plunge further into the details of the language, and fine tune my own writing in the process. I used samples from my own writing in the lessons, which proved to be beneficial for both my brothers and me. The process gave me awareness of the hidden errors in my writing: teaching grammar resulted in a closer analysis of my own. While my tutoring days are over, I learned a lot from taking the role of teacher and improved my writing as a result. 

If someone were to now ask me “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, I would most definitely have a different answer than my fifth grade self. My answer today would probably be a PA (physician’s assistant), but who knows what the answer will be a year from now. Regardless of what my final decision will be, I am almost certain that writing will be a key aspect of any job I wish to pursue. The ability to communicate, whether it is through writing, speaking, or through visuals, is a universal necessity. My growth in writing throughout adolescence, while it may appear to be insignificant, will prove to be important in the grand scheme of life. 

All of the literacy narratives have helped me develop my writing as a process and think critically as I jot down my ideas for my essay and comic. The first version of my literacy narrative challenged my skills in drafting and editing. I had to plan out what I wanted to include in my narrative and turn my ideas into words. For the comic, it required my ability to translate my ideas using another form of presentation. Lastly, this literacy narrative practiced my ability to revise and reflect on my past work.
After creating my comic, I was able to identify the most crucial parts of my story that shaped my writing. Since the comic is much shorter and has more restrictions compared to essays, I left out parts of the first narrative in the comic. This allowed me to check whether these parts of my essay were expressed clearly or if enough detail was included. For example, I focused all of my revisions on the conclusion of my original narrative. I realized that I left out a lot of reasoning and insight at the end of my narrative, and the comic was what helped me to identify this gap.
Now, I see my story emphasizing the most on my academic experience. My writing has changed because of the needs in different classes; it has never been because of myself. This has led me to realize that I should try to write with my own style without the restriction of others. In terms of the narrative, I tried to develop more on the most important part of the story—how both informal and formal writing shaped my writing now.