Literacy Narrative Process Memo

Hannah Sexton

WRT 150

Lauren Rinke

10-12-12

Process Memo

            When I sat down in class and started to think it was a little bit difficult for me to figure out where to start because I couldn’t remember much before 1^st grade so I figured that would be the best place to start. Something interesting I found or remembered when I was making my timeline was that I was really into reading for quite some time until I began to dislike it in 6^th grade. There wasn’t much of a set theme I think in my timeline, other than the fact that I loved books up to a certain point. It was difficult to pick one type of thing to talk about, because I had a bunch on my timeline I wanted to put it all in my paper but couldn’t, it would have been very disorganized. I decided what to pick by just figuring out where my love for reading was lost and explain a little bit before and the a little bit after that point. Creating the timeline explained that I lost my love for reading for almost 7 years which isn’t good at all, it makes me very upset to think about because reading is so important and now that I’m getting back into it I wish I would have kept my love for reading the whole time. I figured it would have been best to talk about my struggles with reading rather than all the reading I used to do because I feel like the struggles I had with reading was a lot more important and I have a better memory of it than my love for reading I had before it. It was difficult to center all my thoughts I had into only a few thoughts, I really struggled with that part of the assignment, I wanted to put a lot more into my literacy narrative than I could. When I began to write my narrative I organized it by age and experiences, I began with my love for reading and how I always read then how I was in the reading class and struggled all the way into 6^th grade which made me lose my love for reading because I was so embarrassed then to now where I work at a daycare and read to my children there all the time, now im starting to read again and love it again. After the first time reading my story and changing a few things that didn’t make sense it read chronologically. It was difficult to organize my thoughts into a draft because I had so many of them; I didn’t use much of any prewriting skills other than brainstorming and my timeline. After the peer review session I realized a lot of things I had to fix grammatically and I had to fix some things that made it sound like a real story some things were jumbled. My partner was very helpful he made some corrections I had missed and gave me more of an idea on how to break down my story to put it into the animoto slideshow. Some constructive criticism he gave me was that I needed to change a few things so it would make better sense and fix some of my grammar mistakes; it was very helpful I didn’t notice some of the things that he had so it was very helpful to me. When I was doing my final edits I wasn’t thinking about how I was going to turn it into a slideshow because I had so much information in my narrative I didn’t know how to narrow it down. It didn’t really alter it at all because I wasn’t thinking about making the slideshow as I was writing my narrative. I believe my partner did choose the best sentences in my paper for my slideshow; I used all of them a little bit more because I felt like there should have been a little information in there than he suggested. I found it very difficult to get my sentences down to only 52 characters per slide, I had a lot more information I wanted to put into a slide but I either had to cut it out or make it into two different slides. My strategy was to figure out different ways to say the things I wanted to say to make them shorter but to also make sure they made sense, it took me a little bit of time to get the text slides done just because of that factor. I used images I felt would give the audience a better understanding of my slideshow, I felt like all my pictures made sense with my text slides and made my slideshow better. I also used some book references as pictures for example the 1984 picture and the Candide picture. I chose the images that were in my slideshow because I really liked them and they gave my slideshow even more detail. Most of the pictures were from the internet but I had some of my own personal pictures in the slideshow also. They all put a picture to my slideshow which gave it more detail and a story is always better with pictures, it makes it more interesting. The song I chose was called Heal up by Cory Sipper, I chose this song off the animoto site and I felt like it made my slideshow better because I struggled with reading and the song talks about getting better and getting there. I wish I would have given more information in my text slides and had more personal photos rather than pictures from the internet.