Literacy Project Thoughts

I found the literacy narrative difficult to write. I almost always find narrative pieces hard to write, but this one more so than usual because not only was I writing about myself (which usually comes out as dry, boring writing for whatever reason), but I was connecting pieces of my life that, in my head, had never been connected before. It was an interesting course of thought, but my first draft still came out, as Trixie told me, "like a list."

The creative remix interested me more than the narrative. After the imovie presentation, I'd decided to do an imovie. However, after hours of work I turned out to have nothing at all. A slew of technical problems completely wiped out everything I'd created, which frustrated me to no end and caused me to decide to work with a different medium. After some thought, I settled on a website. I've only made one complete website before (it wasn't very good), but I really like web design and thought that would be a more unique way to remix my project. At first, I didn't think too much about exactly how the writing from my narrative would translate to my site. Obviously, not directly. Even the text I wrote for the first draft of my site, though always in fairly small paragraph form, was still too long and involved. I'm studying writing for the web right now, but even before I began doing that I knew that what I'd written was unappealing as internet text. The difficulty was to trim what I'd written, to make it concise without losing my meaning. If I didn't make the connections between my literacies clear, or didn't explain something important well enough while trying to be brief, then the point of the site was ruined. I added pictures (by far the most popular comment from my classmates was that they thought the site needed a personal touch from pictures) and music to represent some of the strongest musical memories of my childhood.

The creative remix was fun. It was also difficult because I chose to write it as a kind of narrative as well, so I decided to write it in third person to see if that would improve my personal voice. I think it helped. I wrote that paper in a way I'd never written a narrative before: it's in three parts, and all three parts are very different narrative styles. One is descriptive, one is more introspective, and the last one is sort of a mix I guess. I wanted to try writing each section a little differently as a sort of reflection on different sections of a piece of music, which is also why there are three sections. I was concerned that the different styles would seem jarring, but I liked the finished product and decided that it was ok.