For the last Sunday Sketch, I wanted to show the process of how I was able to achieve the learning outcomes as I took this course. I used the process of human evolution to refer to how I started the course off with a limited number of skills but was able to achieve a lot at the end of the run. Digital citizenship exists at the beginning as it’s just about using technology appropriately and engaging responsibly in online spaces. Rhetorical composition is the last learning outcome that I’ve achieved, as other outcomes are strategies required to achieve rhetorical composition.
As a person who listens to many songs, I have various playlists for different situations. There are playlists that I listen to when I work out, study, and relax. For this playlist, the rhetorical situation I am engaging with is the emotions I have at night, and I’ll never get tired of. Usually, at night people tend to get emotional. During this time, I like to listen to this playlist, remain rational, and stay motivated. In order for the songs to be part of this playlist, they should contain catchy and meaningful lyrics.
The album cover is a picture of a view from my house, which has a beautiful skyline at night. Even though it’s not the best photo to represent “night,” I chose to use it as the cover of my playlist as it is one of my favorite photos and represents the colors of my songs being dark but also bright.
The full version of the playlist is about 2 hours, but I had to cut it down as half of it contained Korean songs.
When I first looked at the assignment, I thought of movies I liked, such as Joker, Batman, and Star Wars. However, as these movies required extra costumes with facial makeup, I decided to choose a different one. As a result, I chose the scene from ‘The Great Gatsby’ where Leonardo DiCaprio holds his drink and smiles at the party. Even though this wasn’t my favorite movie, I chose this scene because as I was looking in my closet for clothes to wear, I saw the suit that I had only worn once this year. This made me decide to wear the suit for this project and eventually choose this scene from The Great Gatsby. I found this assignment to be very fun as I got the opportunity to wear the suit that I brought all the way from Korea.
The question that I had for myself was about how productive I am. To answer my question, I looked at the categories of hours sitting in front of the desk, actual working hours, sleep, exercise, and my motivation level. The hours sitting in front of the desk are the number of hours I sat in front of the desk, including the hours I was working/studying, watching my phone, and talking with my friends. The actual working category is when I studied and did academic work. The sleep and exercise/workout category is literally what it means. The motivation category is on a scale of 1 to 10, where ten is fully motivated.
Based on the data gathered, I could realize that I was highly productive on the weekdays, especially from Monday to Thursday. This was because most of the assignments were due these days, and I wanted to ensure that I didn’t have to do much work on the weekend. Due to such pressure, the hours of sleep from Sunday to Wednesday are shorter than Thursday to Saturday. I’m not productive on Thursday compared to other days because I don’t have any classes on Friday, which makes me want to take a break. The level of motivation had a positive correlation with my productivity, as when I was highly motivated to do my academic work, I was highly productive.
In the future, I believe that the results could be more accurate if I could track my productivity for at least three weeks to get a better average. Also, additional categories could be used to analyze my productivity and increase the reliability of the data and conclusion.
Overall, I was pretty sure that I am a person that depends a lot on the level of motivation that fuels me to be productive. After I tracked my productivity, I proved that I was a very motivation-dependent person. This made me think about the ways how I can stay motivated for a more extended period as I would need to be productive for most of the days when I work after graduating college.
As a person who prefers to talk and present verbally to people than in writing, I expected this assignment to be much easier to talk about the analysis I made. Selecting the books wasn’t a big deal when preparing for the presentation. The general structure of choosing the pages to analyze, create a plan, and write the essay/script was the same. However, the difference was the details. The issue that I had was choosing a limited number of scenes from each book. While some people might say that the presentation was easier for them because the outline and the script were a maximum of 2 pages long, it wasn’t for me. This was because I wanted to spend more time on the pages that I selected and provide a detailed analysis of the use of symbolism, the intention of the author, and the stylistic devices used. If the assignment had given me more time for each scene and a longer presentation time, I would have been able to talk more about it. As there was a time limit for each slide, I had to make my analysis as precise and concise as possible. This challenged me to choose the most exciting scenes from Stitches and Kindred and make the presentation convincing.
When deciding what kind of trauma I would like to focus on, I decided to look at the trauma between an individual and society. I chose Stitches and Kindred because I thought that the two would be the perfect example of representing an individual’s and society’s trauma. Here the individual was David, and the society was the African American community, which Dana represented.
When creating the presentation, I used a minimalist approach. Instead of having lengthy words on the slides, I just had the scenes on the slide on a black background. I used such an approach in order for the audience to listen to my voice instead of reading the text on the PowerPoint. I also used the black background to create a dark atmosphere, reminding the audience of trauma. The last slide was an image of a person walking out of the cave and towards the light. This slide was intended to show how David and Dana went through healing from their trauma and overcame it.
When giving this type of presentation, I’ve learned the importance and significance of being concise and precise at the same time. The limited amount of time per slide pushed me to select the essential parts of the comics and analyze them. After giving my presentation and watching my peers, I felt that I could have focused on a single scene through 2 slides by talking about the symbolism in the first slide and the stylistic device on the second slide.
The entire literacy narrative project was definitely one of the most unique pieces of writing I’ve done throughout my life. The way the literacy narrative developed from 1 to 3 was enough to help meet the learning outcome of “Practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection.”
It was weird to return to the alphabetic literacy narrative after creating my comic because I had gone through the story a lot when making the comic. However, when writing literacy narrative 3, I felt that I could improve my essay by focusing on my story of developing as a human rather than the writing skills I’ve learned in elementary and middle school. I did think that working in the visual medium and now returning to a text narrative could limit my creativity when writing the text. However, unlike what I expected, there wasn’t really a problem of lacking creativity as there was a strong base for my story, and I just had to focus on the big picture.
The story that I’m telling is now more focused on how I developed as a student, portraying how I got interested in writing and reading and how that helped me eventually get into Emory. Now my story does not have the unnecessary context that I previously had and is more focused on the story of myself.
Overall, I enjoyed this Literacy Narrative Comic as it was able to reflect the first assignment into comics. While creating this comic, I had various ideas about how I should express my story in drawings. After receiving some feedback on my initial storyboard, I adjusted some changes into the comic and focused more on how I developed myself as a writer and reader. As I am not a good drawer, I was concerned about how my story couldn’t be delivered in the way I intended. However, I still tried my best to deliver the message that I wanted to offer by using creative ideas with an extra explanation about how I reached such a situation in the comic.
If I had the opportunity to, I would like to hire a professional illustrator to make a comic about my life and how I was able to develop not only as a writer but also as a human being. The specific scene that I would put in the most work would be the scene where I study at my Grandma’s house. This was where I stayed during the summer break before my senior year and was entirely focused on my studies and is a symbol of my most passionate and motivated period of time. The most important part of this scene would be expressing its relaxed and peaceful atmosphere with a student fully dedicated to his studies.
During this activity, I was able to develop the ability to summarize, analyze, and evaluate the ideas of others as I undertook scholarly inquiry to talk about my story in developing the way I read and write and eventually come to Emory.
After looking at the instructions, I immediately thought of drawing a comic about the stressful schedule that I have since the 24th of February and until the 3rd of March. Unlike other assignments, this wasn’t challenging in terms of thinking about an idea. I believe crafting this sort of comic is different from the triptych in terms of delivering a more profound story as it had the middle act stretch across two panels. I made this story to stay motivated for the devastating week coming up and encourage students to have their heads up as spring break is coming.
