The Secret Language of Comics

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My Health – Anirudh Seshadri

Student Posts

The first five graphs above were hard/explicit metrics I collated over a span of two weeks that I thought could best represent my health every day. The five categories were the amount of times I looked at my phone for more than 3 minutes, how many fruits I had eaten, how much water I had drank, my average heart rate, and the amount of sleep I got the previous night.

By taking these metrics and standardizing them (higher values of negative metrics i.e. times I looked at my phone and heart rate were made negative and vice versa) I was able to create a 0 to 1 range of my health for that day

This is reflected in my sixth graph showing my health per day. It accurately shows my health where, on days where I drank lots of water and ate plenty of fruits, my health was high.

Now looking at the data in front of me, I realize I need to make my health a larger priority and stay consistently high throughout the week. These metrics turned out to be great tools for measuring health because now I know exactly what I need to improve on to increase my health quotient for that day. I was able to effecitvely answer my question of whether my habits were conducive to a healthy lifestyle.

Anxiety Chart

Student Posts
https://infogram.com/column-stacked-chart-1hzj4o3e581zo4p?live


This week I have been particularly busy and anxious so I decided to keep track of my feelings of anxiety and visualize it in order to better identify the sources and potentially improve my overall mental health.

The measurement is based on three types of anxiety: social, academic, and existential. Since I have been writing dairies on a daily basis for almost six years, it’s easy for me to keep track of the events and feelings during the day so I didn’t particularly change my way of recording and simply remind myself to include more details while writing.

Overall, I found that I usually enjoy Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday because I enjoyed the classes more and I was occupied by work so didn’t really have time to overthink. Thursday was my most anxious day because I was experiencing anxiety from all three perspectives, while on Friday and Saturday even though there were stressful events but they were balanced off by the enjoyment I got from other perspectives.

Through the assignment, I proposed several ways to lower my anxiety level: 1/take courses that you really enjoy and try to make friends in class 2/If Tue/Thu are usually stressful, leave sth fun to do on these days (like new episode of the radio) 3/try to avoid using social media when ur already stressed out by school work, and block your ex

Reflection to Comics

Student Posts

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.

Reflection Post (Tracing Pages)

Student Posts

This assignment was very different from the other assignments we have done before because this had a segment regarding tracing pages. Tracing the pages in this assignment made me realize the author’s thought process while he/she was drawing it. They focused on each panel and every specific image in this comic strip. The formation of the thesis was different for me because I was very used to the thesis being straight to the point located in the beginning of the essay. I feel like I understand more about comics in general along with these specific comics because this assignment pushed me to dive deeper and focus on things below the base level. This includes focusing on the tone and images in these comics. I would say the biggest thing I have learned from this is the openness of comics and how it is up to the reader to determine the relationship between the story and the panels. The thesis of my tracing pages is found below, “Page 255 of Stitches and Page 58 of Fun Home are both very important moments in the play because they are turning points of each narrative and indicate a certain realization on the part of the protagonist but consequently the characters learn new things that they weren’t aware of in the beginning.”

Link to Tracing Page 1

Link to Tracing Page 2

Link to my essay

Tracing Pages Reflection

Student Posts

My thesis in my essay was that David Small and Alison Bechdel use repetitive images and choice of frame strategically to aid their storytelling, but while these tools allow Bechdel’s illustrations to better support her written narrative, they allow Small to let his illustrations stand alone, therefore making audience participation more straightforward in Stitches and broader in Fun Home. In my essay, I argue that Small and Bechdel utilized similar rhetorical devices in the creation of their respective pages, but because of the difference in their use of language, the results of these devices created very different experiences for the reader.

When completing the tracing pages assignment, the first steps of actually tracing and annotating the pages were very useful when completing my analysis. I usually don’t know where to begin or what to focus on when annotating documents, so I found your directions very helpful because I was able to systematically go through each rhetorical tool or method and determine where and how it was being used on my selected page. Something I did that really helped me to compare the two authors’ pages was including a list of what I thought the top three most important/relevant clarity terms were for each page. For Stitches specifically, the act of tracing the page made me really pay attention to David Small’s linework, which made me think about why he chose to include the details he did. 

The essay part of this assignment was really hard for me because I am not used to writing inductive essays. I had a lot of ideas from annotating the tracings, but the amount of evidence overwhelmed me because I couldn’t figure out how to neatly organize it all. I ended up typing out all of my annotations and sorting them into broad categories on a google document. From there I drafted an argument based on the patterns I saw and started to piece together my essay. I had to rewrite/rearrange my paragraphs a lot more often than I usually do when writing essays because I would forget to write them in an inductive format. Overall, the hardest part about this essay was coming up with an ABT thesis in the last paragraph. 

I think this assignment did help me understand the secret language of comics a lot better. After close reading the pages it became very obvious to me how conscious every decision is in the creation of a single page, not to mention a whole book. I definitely have a better understanding of the themes of both Stitches and Fun Home after completing this assignment. It was also very interesting to see how similar the comics are to each other. Individually, something about Fun Home that clicked for me while completing this assignment was that Alison Bechdel was comparing herself to her father throughout the comic. Also in Stitches, I noticed that facial expressions have a huge impact on the mood of Stitches.

Healthy Habits?

Student Posts

The problem I wanted to tackle with this project was the effect five fairly mundane lifestyle habits had on my general happiness. I admittedly selected a unique set of days to track data as I spent 03/11 and 03/12 in London with some of my friends on spring break, 03/13 in an airplane flying back to Atlanta, and 03/14 and 03/15 doing an ungodly amount of school work. I imagine if I were to repeat this process over seven ordinary days, my findings might be slightly different.

I found that a good night’s sleep generally added to my happiness. However, extraordinary circumstances might have overruled the effect sleep had on my well-being over those days. However, my eating patterns certainly had a noticeable relationship with my happiness. I found that three meal days contributed to me being relatively happy. Although the days I ate three meals pales in comparison to the previous days, my ability to maintain a healthy eating schedule made those days better than they could have been. I found that typically when I was eating four meals, it was because I had not eaten three complete meals earlier in the day and became ravenously hungry, resulting in a second dinner of sorts.

I did not drink out of my water bottle as much I had expected to while I was in London, partially due to my access to other fluids but also partly due to neglect. I found that I typically drank more when I was isolated in my room with my water bottle being my exclusive source of fluids. In this sense, I don’t think that metric as I measured it was very effective. I do, however, believe that there is some correlation between my general hydration and my happiness levels. The same can be said for the time I spent exercising. Although I spent a lot of time on my feet whilst in London, I suspect I would have been equally as happy viewing the city while on the top of a guided tour bus. Being somewhere exciting contributed to my happiness more than my physical activity.

Sketch 8: Data viz from everyday life

Reflection of Literacy Narrative Part 3

Student Posts

The literacy Narrative process allowed me to explore and grow in the revision and editing process, compose texts in different genres and styles, and collaborate with individuals in the classroom.

I did not particularly like going back to my abc literacy narrative just because I realize how basic and “flat” it was. I generally do not like revisiting old work of mine but doing so allowed me to make the necessary changes to really put it over the top and connect the main idea which, before, did not have an effective bridge.

I see my story as more complete and understandable. Before, only I would have really understood what the essay was trying to convey, however, it was not as clear to others. Now it bridges the gap in logic and is more coherent to other readers.

Writing So. Revised

Student Posts

My return to my alphabetic literacy narrative proved to be challenging. I am coming off a reasonably tricky month in terms of workload and general wellbeing. I think I was beginning to hit a wall as I started to think about how to meaningfully revise So., making the writing process cumbersome. That said, I do believe I took strides in the right direction by framing my narrative to give an answer the big so what? Still, I think it is unrefined and far from perfect.

I derived my idea to make my fifth-grade experience with Ms. Mannering the centerpiece of my alphabetical narrative from my comic. This is an excellent example of how interacting with a visual medium like comics enriched my ability to reason with traditional text. I don’t think I would have generated that idea if it weren’t for my time considering my narrative visually. However, I slightly altered the story’s focus from finding Heaney’s Beowulf in a bookstore to my experience with his poem Digging. My comic directly inspired me to incorporate a poem’s content and themes into my alphabetical story, similar to the way I intertwined the text of Ozymandian into the comic version.

So.

Reflection-literacy narrative 3

Student Posts

In the final version of my literary narrative, I wrote a new beginning and ending, and added a few details throughout my narrative. The process of drawing the comics made me realize the importance of details, be it examples that support my argument or descriptions of a particular emotion or realization, since they are the key factors to make a story interesting and convincing. Therefore, I added more details about the content of the dairies and stories I mentioned in my essay, hoping that they would make my narration to be more comprehensible and relatable.

However, the changes I made to the beginning and the ending of my final narrative are drastically different from the ones I had in the comics, as I felt that the same narrative would be less ineffective if it was presented through text instead of visuals, especially colors. For me, the visual medium allows me to establish a certain ambiance and incorporate cues more implicitly and effortlessly, while in a text narrative, I might have to spend a lengthy paragraph to achieve the same effect. However, the combination of text and self-created visuals was to me indeed the most powerful presentation of my idea. The visuals give me the opportunity to influence the amount of time readers spent on each part, thus allowing me to highlight certain parts of the story.

Colored Glass

Reflection on Post Narrative, Part 3

Student Posts
  • How has the entire literacy narrative project helped you to meet the Learning Outcomes for this class
  • How was it to return to the alphabetic literacy narrative after having created your comic? How did you think differently after having worked in the visual medium and now returning to a text narrative?
  • How do you see the story you are trying to tell in different terms now? Was your analytical thinking process any different?

This entire literacy narrative project has helped me meet the following learning outcomes for this class: Practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection; Demonstrate collaborative skills in classroom discussion and while working together on projects and presentations; Use technology rhetorically and appropriately, and engage responsibly in online spaces. I was able to practice writing as a process through the creation of the essay, its multiple revisions and edits, and reflections of said revisions and edits through the reflection posts. I was also able to demonstrate collaborative skills in classroom discussion by peer-reviewing other people’s comic strips and giving constructive advice on how they could better the construction of the storyline. Lastly, through the continuous upload of our work to our WordPress website, I am able to use technology appropriately and responsibly in online spaces.

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