The Secret Language of Comics

Tag: reflection

Literacy Narrative Reflection

Student Posts

I enjoyed the freewriting exercise more than I imagined. It has been a long time since I was able to type down random information in whichever way I wanted. Though I only used part of the free-writing in my literacy narrative, I realized the memory I chose was still one of the turning points in the way I read.

After finishing the narrative, I realized my writing style had changed drastically. In the past, I have purposely made changes to my writing, but as I grew older, my style slowly changed without my realization. Throughout the writing process, I tried to type down every idea I had in my mind and attempted to make it flow together in a logical way. This allowed me to pick out the ones I liked and believed would work and eliminate those that I thought were irrelevant to my narrative

In conclusion, I would look forward to more freewriting exercises and discover more about my writing.

Link to Literacy Narrative

Literacy Narrative ReflectioN

Student Posts

Writing the Literacy Narrative felt simultaneously like writing a personal narrative and also like writing a rhetorical analysis essay. I felt like I had to analyze my achievements as a writer but also how my opinions about writing changed over time. “Intuition and Other Thoughts” was written as I wrote any other piece of writing, which was essentially to write every single thought I had, then cut out anything unnecessary and using that big bulk of writing as an outline. Yet, writing “Intuition and Other Thoughts” was unlike anything else I have ever written. The piece ends up being a love letter to my mother and her major involvement in the type of writer I become. It also speaks on my opinion of the writing-and-revising process.

The writing process was different, due to the X-Pages Exercise. It was very similar to what I usually do but much more helpful when clarifying a single scene, which I ended up embedding into the narrative. The scene I described for the X-Pages Exercise became the frame of the tiny pockets of scenes I added in. I do wonder if it made me too focused on the scene of the narrative, rather than the actual point of the essay. It might be my missing of Texas that may have resulted in too much Waco geography knowledge that any person not from Waco will ever need.

I realized that I have a lot of different, conflicting emotions about writing, which I think a lot of people can say. My mother becoming a central figure of the narrative was not what I was expecting, but looking back, it seems obvious that she would be the focus of how I became the writer that I am today. Funnily enough, if my mother would read the narrative, I think she would tell me the same thing she tells me there, “Get to the point! Write about me less.” I think I used to view myself as a really bad writer but came to acknowledge through writing this that even though I may be a bad writer, it is okay because at least I have room to grow.

I think people would find the sentence, “I am a slow learner, a slow writer—a perfectionist when it comes to word choice and each individual sentence but easily lost when it comes to THE BIG IDEA,” most interesting because it describes what kind of writer I am. Most people expect perfectionism to be helpful when writing or studying, but it can result in a pointless, circular, or even boring piece of writing if you lose sight of the big picture.

The Texas sunset in all its glory…and my friend. Throwing a rock into the lake.
Taken by Josie Sim

Literacy Narrative Reflection

Student Posts
photo credits: Abhi Sharma: Flicker

When writing my X-pages exercise, I struggled to remember specific details because it had be so long ago. I decided to not include any experiences from my free-write in my literacy narrative, but it helpful because it had me thinking about different times in my life when I had opposing views on reading and writing. I enjoyed the process of writing my narrative because it allowed me to reflect on the fond childhood memories I had of reading, and how those memories changed from positive to negative then back to positive. The essay also allowed me to reflect on my junior year english class and how it established a new way of thinking about reading and writing. While I wrote the narrative, I struggled to include moments of both reading and writing because I realized it was easier for me to recall important memories of reading rather than memories of writing.

Link to Literacy Narrative Pt. 1

Literacy Comic Reflection

Sketches

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.

Halfa Kucha Reflection

Sketches

Due: Friday 4/15

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

Tracing Stitches and Spinning Reflection

Sketches

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)?

Literacy Narrative Comic Reflection

Sketches

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

Assignments

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?

Sketch 6: What’s in your bag?

Sketches

Due: 10/1

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. Then 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. 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.

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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