The Secret Language of Comics

Tag: literacy narrative reflection

Literacy Narrative Part 2 – Reflection

Student Posts

Having finished this entire process, I feel relieved. Not because the assignment is over or that I did not enjoy the process, but because making a comic is a long and arduous process that, though tiring, is an extremely gratifying thing to accomplish.

              Completing this assignment helped me reach the learning outcome pertaining to practicing writing as a process. The comic was preceded by a full-length narrative that was the backbone of this comic. The first Literacy Narrative assignment allowed me to put my ideas to paper and pen and revise them as I saw fit. That process in itself required many steps that built off of each other and this assignment was only a furthering of those steps. Making these many iterations of my essay in every step of the process benefitted my comic greatly.

              Going back to the difficulty of making a comic, one thing I heavily underestimated was the visual aspect. As obvious as it was, I did not give much thinking to the details of my drawings. The biggest problem about the visual aspect of my comic was choosing what I wanted to put on paper. I had a million ideas for how to show eight years passing by or what scene from my favorite comics I wanted to depict to demonstrate their sneaky complexity. I was trying to do something profound on every page but I think realizing it was probably better keeping everything simple was the right choice. The storyboard assignment helped slightly with this but even then, I was not entirely happy with my decisions and felt they were made too hastily.

              With this in mind we can take a look at my comic and see why I kept in what I did. The first page is highlighted by three comics I used to read early on in my childhood. The first panel consists of three covers of each comic that I distinctly remember from my head. I did not search up images to prompt my memory, I took what I vaguely remembered and drew them out. I did the same thing for the next three panels on the first page with scenes that stuck out to me from each series. On the second page, I decided to show eight years passing by through the height markers from every year in our family room wall; again keeping with the theme of simplicity. The last panel on the last page was the one that involved the most brainstorming. I wanted to end my comic with a visual that aptly summarized my experience with texts from high school and my childhood and shedding it in a positive light. I did this by drawing characters or symbols that represent the texts that I have read (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and Amar Chitra Katha to name a few) and surrounded them around a comical version of myself with a light switch substituted for my brain. I wanted to really capture what it felt like for me when that switch “flicked” in my head.

Literacy Narrative Part 2 – Reflection

Student Posts

Having finished this entire process, I feel relieved. Not because the assignment is over or that I did not enjoy the process, but because making a comic is a long and arduous process that, though tiring, is an extremely gratifying thing to accomplish.

              Completing this assignment helped me reach the learning outcome pertaining to practicing writing as a process. The comic was preceded by a full-length narrative that was the backbone of this comic. The first Literacy Narrative assignment allowed me to put my ideas to paper and pen and revise them as I saw fit. That process in itself required many steps that built off of each other and this assignment was only a furthering of those steps. Making these many iterations of my essay in every step of the process benefitted my comic greatly.

              Going back to the difficulty of making a comic, one thing I heavily underestimated was the visual aspect. As obvious as it was, I did not give much thinking to the details of my drawings. The biggest problem about the visual aspect of my comic was choosing what I wanted to put on paper. I had a million ideas for how to show eight years passing by or what scene from my favorite comics I wanted to depict to demonstrate their sneaky complexity. I was trying to do something profound on every page but I think realizing it was probably better keeping everything simple was the right choice. The storyboard assignment helped slightly with this but even then, I was not entirely happy with my decisions and felt they were made too hastily.

              With this in mind we can take a look at my comic and see why I kept in what I did. The first page is highlighted by three comics I used to read early on in my childhood. The first panel consists of three covers of each comic that I distinctly remember from my head. I did not search up images to prompt my memory, I took what I vaguely remembered and drew them out. I did the same thing for the next three panels on the first page with scenes that stuck out to me from each series. On the second page, I decided to show eight years passing by through the height markers from every year in our family room wall; again keeping with the theme of simplicity. The last panel on the last page was the one that involved the most brainstorming. I wanted to end my comic with a visual that aptly summarized my experience with texts from high school and my childhood and shedding it in a positive light. I did this by drawing characters or symbols that represent the texts that I have read (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and Amar Chitra Katha to name a few) and surrounded them around a comical version of myself with a light switch substituted for my brain. I wanted to really capture what it felt like for me when that switch “flicked” in my head.

Literacy Narrative Reflection

Student Posts

Thinking and writing the literacy narrative – an archaeology of my self in words – is the kind of self-examination I did for the first in 15 years of literate experience. Before typing the first word, I spent a couple of days doing nothing but to “passively” let the memories float to me – the books I’ve read, the earliest literate experience, cybersurfing, comics, etc. This passive archaeology had been a great help for me to analyze the interconnectivity and pattern of my reading habits.

My literacy narrative boils down to a few topics: my earliest literate experience in unwillingly reciting poetry, which motivated my interest in them; its relation with mandarin cyberspace linguistics; my taste shifted from the favor for esoteric mysticism to the clear, direct, and logical language, in which the classical example would be mathematical proofs; lastly, my slow reading habit. All the preceding ideas were discovered by myself during the process of writing the narrative, which I view as a reward for this assignment. If any sentence ever resonates with the reader, I would vote for the following:” This habit eventually affected my SAT reading performance, so I had to temporarily give up thinking and do the problems, which was a painful experience (although finally, I got full marks on the reading section).” because I believe many people also suffered SAT reading and went through a healing process after it – one main theme of our class.

Literacy Narrative Reflection

Assignments

Once you have published your literacy narrative as a page on your site, you’ll need to also publish a post about the narrative that links to the page (how to add a link in a post or a page). That post serves three fundamental functions:

  • it provides a compelling preview of your narrative that summarizes your controlling idea in a sentence or two;
  • it reflects on what you have learned in the process of writing your literacy narrative;
  • when your post syndicates to the class site, that constitutes turning in your narrative.

Some questions to consider in your reflection:

  • What was your writing process for this narrative like? Did it feel strange for you to do the freewriting exercises first? How did the freewriting influence the essay you eventually wrote?
  • What did you learn about yourself by the end of writing your narrative? Was there anything that you found surprising, or something about yourself that you came to view differently in the process of writing this essay?
  • What sentence from your essay do you think someone else reading it would identify as the most interesting sentence?
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