Literacy Narrative Process Memo

Khadijah El-Amin

Professor Lauren Rinke

Writing 150

October 12, 2012

Literacy Narrative Process Memo

 

As I sat down in class to begin my timeline, the most logical place for me to start was age one. At that age I was in the beginning stage of becoming literate. Remembering the small details was not hard in my case because at that age it’s the basic age and the beginning age of your life. Not much detail for just one year in the life stage. I just know that I began to pick up simple words and knew what certain things were. My parents made it their job to help me become literate. One thing I found interesting about my literacy development in my timeline was actually seeing that over time I really improved and progressed in my reading and writing. I never knew this until actually writing it out and seeing my progression. The theme throughout my timeline was reading and focusing on the books that made me like reading even more; which was reading Junie B. Jones books.

Deciding which area to focus on was not hard at all. Reading was my passion growing up. I already knew what to write about automatically. The experience of creating a timeline made me realize that as growing up I grasped things very quickly compared to others my age. I’m a very determined person when it comes to improving on any weak areas and I take that with me to become better than the day before.

            Narrowing down to an area of focus for my written narrative was very simple. Reading was what I like to do best. Ideas that jumped out at me were the small details from my childhood in which helped me become a better reader. When I began to write my narrative I organized it by age in my timeline in which I created. While writing, everything flowed quite easily. I didn’t use any prewriting strategies; the timeline had helped me enough. After composing my rough draft the only thing I changed was adding more details. My partner helped me fix that, there was a lot of room for more details to make my narrative more inviting. This helped me a lot because this is where I struggle in writing and I always overlook it, but in this case I changed it, which made it better.

When I made the final edits to my narrative I had no clue to how I was going to turn my narrative story into a video slideshow. The way I would normally write a story is to just briefly describe as many details as possible. When making a video slideshow you have to edit and pick out the most important details, which can be quite challenging in my opinion.

           My peer review partner chose only eight of my sentences because of the short time limit we had in class. I chose all of them for my slideshow. All the sentences that my peer review partner chose where very good sentences because they were the main concepts. I did find it difficult to edit my text down for a 52-character limit. I wanted to add more information but couldn’t. My strategy was highlighting the best details only that I wanted to share. The images I used was a good way to buffer between my text slides. It gave me the opportunity to add more information, despite the small text limitations.

Choosing the images was very easy. They were images of things I like that has to do with reading. All were personal and from the web, they helped tell my story clearly. Choosing a song was very random; I used one from the website which went well with my overall them. It communicates with my literacy by me being a very determent person. The only thing I wish I could have done differently was to use more of my own personal photos.