Nicholas Cundiff
Professor Rinke
Writing 150
12 October 2012
Writing
Is a Part of You
When
I sat down to start my timeline, I was stuck. I had never really been the most
literate person around. The most logical place I thought of to start with, or
could even remember for that matter, was my love for the movie Mary Poppins. When I was younger, I
would watch that movie religiously. I was addicted. I decided that would be the most logical place
to start my timeline. It was quite difficult to remember a lot of details
throughout the years. There were very few moments I could think of that I actually
remembered details of the event. Something interesting that I realized is that
I actually learned more things growing than I thought I did. It seemed like a
lot of the things I’ve learned have been experiences from school, but really,
it was out of school functions that I have learned the most from. My timeline
mainly focused on movies and books. Obviously, the Mary Poppins movie was a big influence growing up. I eventually got
into the American/Michigan Chiller series. I’ve read every book, and even today,
if I see one I haven’t read yet, I buy it and read it. The area I decided to
focus on was the areas that impacted me the most. The topic I chose was my high
school communications final essay and how it made me a better writer. At first,
it was difficult to pick one topic. I kept second guessing myself whether the
topic would be a good one or not. Once I picked the topic I wanted, it was
fairly easy to stick to the topic at hand. *The experience of making a timeline
is that my life lacked literacy! Well, literacy was a factor in my life, just
not as big of factor that it should have been. The timeline helped show that to
me.*
For
the most part, I struggled with narrowing down an area of focus for this
assignment. I couldn’t ever really think of any topics in the first place. So
trying to focus on one topic for a fifteen slide animoto was even more
challenging. To say this more clearly, no idea really jumped out at me. When I
did finally decide on a topic, my organization at the beginning severely lacked.
I was just writing down ideas for the
essay as they were popping into my head. By the time I had listed all my ideas,
they were completely out of order. It took me a while to put it in
chronological order. It was somewhat difficult to form a draft. I listed all
the main posts of my draft in to bullet list form. Then, I literally filled in
sentences from that around the main points. I don’t really think I used a
prewriting strategy. If I did, I am unaware of it. When I went into the peer
review class day, I wasn’t really too confident with my work. It was rough and
choppy at times. Thankfully, I had two awesome partners that read and corrected
a lot of my wrongs. They helped me make my sentences sound smoother. It was
great advice. I refined my essay that night. It sounded a whole lot better the
next day reading it over. During the final stages of my editing process, I had
a clear idea what sentences I was going to use for my Animoto slideshow. My
peers helped me with underlining good sentences to use. I used most of the
sentences they underlined, but not all of them. It altered the way I would have
written it into something better. My peers helped me make my slideshow better.
My
peers did an excellent job when picking my sentences. Out of the fifteen that I
use, twelve of the sentences were from what my peers picked. If my peers had
not of picked their fifteen best sentences, my slideshow would not of been as
good as it was (not necessarily saying it was.) The fifty-two character limit
per slide made it rough to use some of my sentences. I was trying to keep one
idea to one slide. That made this task even more challenging. A lot of my
sentences didn’t really sound like sentences a college student would use. I
ended up using a strategy of making my sentences as simple as possible.
Probably not the best strategy, but it worked. The way I formatted my Animoto
slideshow is it went text slide, then picture slide, etc…. The images were
supposed to compliment the text slides. The images would be a reference to the
slide that just came up. For example, on one of the text slides, I mentioned my
teacher Mrs. Rexroat. On the picture slide, I put a picture of a teacher (I
didn’t own a picture of Mrs. Rexroat.) I choose all the images for a specific
reason. Each picture represented the main idea of what each text slide was
portraying. I had to use all web images because I didn’t have any personal
images that fit in with my slideshow. I believe that detracted from the main
points of the narrative. It would have been a ton better with personal pictures
rather than web images. I chose Somewhere
Over The Rainbow because it is a song for hope. Somewhere down the road,
things will get better. In my case, my challenge was the writing assignment for
my high school communications class. Somewhere over the rainbow, my writing
will get better. And it did! If I could go back and change one thing, it would
be my sentences for each slide on the slideshow. I wish I had used two slides
for some of my sentences instead of cramming all of it on one slide.
*This is a reminder of the E-mails I have sent you.*
