James Hanly
Rinke
Writing 150
12 October 2012
Reflections
When I first sat down in class to
begin my timeline, the most logical place for me to begin was by thinking back
to a memory involving reading that stood out in my mind. My thoughts were
immediately drawn to my unfortunate experience surrounding the second Harry Potter movie, and it was then that
I realized that much of my desire to read had occurred because of my love of
the Harry Potter series. Suddenly, I
began remembering events in perfect sequence, using the Harry Potter movies as reference to points in time. I soon found
that I had so much information that it was hard to condense my timeline into a
paper. Something I had never thought much about before was how big a role Harry Potter had been in my life; it was
the one constant I could look forward to as I grew up even as everything around
me changed.
As I began making my timeline into a
paper, some themes presented themselves. I noticed that a single bad experience
with reading could turn me off of wanting to read for quite a while afterword;
this happened to me both after watching the second Harry Potter movie and also in tenth and eleventh grade when I had
elected to take advanced English courses.
I definitely structured my paper around my experiences with Harry Potter because reading the books
and watching the movies were a large part of my childhood; they helped shape my
appreciation for literature. For me, it was not difficult to focus on one event
to write about because all of my Harry-Potter-related
events interconnected, so I had no trouble making the story flow. The experience of creating a timeline about
myself helped me learn about why I liked reading so much. Because it is such a
big hobby and appreciation of mine, I do not often stop to think about why I
feel so passionately about it; now I understand.
In order to narrow down an area of
focus for my narrative, I started off by thinking about my inspiration for the
timeline. My inspiration had been how
much the second Harry Potter movie
had turned me off of wanting to read, so that is how I began writing my paper.
Because I remember the event so vividly, it was not difficult to connect with
the memory on an emotional level and write about how I had been feeling. From that memory on, I was able to compose a
straightforward story. When I wrote my
narrative, I decided to organize it chronologically because this helped me
remember how the events had happened and how they had affected my literacy. Because I had organized my timeline chronologically,
I was able to transition it into a paper rather candidly, so I did not need to
utilize any prewriting strategies.
After my paper was peer reviewed, I
had a few things to change. The first
thing my partners had pointed out was the length of my paper. It was not quite three full pages long, and
the requirement was between four to five pages, which was a requirement I had
not initially noticed. I am glad that
they mentioned something because had my paper been much shorter, it probably
would have been difficult to transition it into a video. Other than that, my partners did not give me
much constructive criticism, but I had edited it pretty thoroughly beforehand,
so maybe that helped them out a bit. I
always like to have someone else look over my work before I turn it in to be
graded because it is nice to have someone catch the things you might miss.
When
I made my final edits to my narrative, I was not really thinking about how it
would transition into a slideshow. This project
had so many different parts that I really only focused on completing one
section at a time so that I would not get confused. It was a little hard to think about what
events would transition into the video because I was fairly certain that my
paper contained too many details to include them all. Ultimately, I tried to keep my storyline
concise, so that when I began making the video, the process would be more
straightforward.
My
peer review partners chose fifteen good sentences from my paper, but I am not sure
that they were the best sentences. It is
hard to say because many of my best sentences were pretty lengthy, so they
could not be incorporated properly into my slideshow. I found it very difficult to work with the fifty-two
character limit, and consequently, I had to spend lots of time editing down my
own writing. I can’t really say that I
have a strategy for making the words fit. I guess that I just read through my long
sentences and wrote concise summaries that retained the point. I’m still not sure that my story was conveyed
as powerfully in the slideshow as it was in my paper because the words had to
be short and the sentences had to be choppy, which does not reflect how I write
at all.
I
think that my images transitioned between text slides pretty nicely because
they complimented the words; the video would not have had the same effect
without the pictures because they almost made up for how few words there could
be. I think that the strategy I used to
choose pictures would be that if I mentioned a book then I would show a picture
of a book, and so on. It was fairly easy
to incorporate the images appropriately into the video because they really
added to your understanding of the storyline.
Most of my images were from the web because most of what I talked about
involved specific books and movies. I
mentioned my family specifically a little at the beginning, so at that point I
chose to incorporate some pictures of them.
For the most part, however, I chose to use web images so that viewers
could place an image with what I was talking about.
I
did not have to think twice about what song to choose for my slideshow. The moment that I sat down to begin working on
it, I knew that I wanted to use Harry
Potter’s theme song. I feel that it was a very appropriate choice of song
because it correlated perfectly with the references I was making. Listening to this song also helped anyone who
had seen the movies recognize their own memories they might have with the
series. I think that this song helps communicate
that from a book series, spawned a movie series, and this song came from that. It symbolizes the transition of literacy into
different forms of media while still conveying the same message.
After
having watched my literacy narrative video for the last time, I am not sure
that I would have done anything differently. I suppose that I could have chosen
to include more personal details that deviated from the Harry Potter series like I did in my paper, but I also remember
thinking that I did not want to confuse the audience by skipping around and
trying to explain too many stories with so few words. Ultimately, I am pretty pleased with how
things went (considering that I am just happy that I could figure out how to
work animoto at all), and I’ve definitely learned more about myself through
literacy than I’d ever realized before.
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