Having created a comic before returning to my alphabetic narrative was truly helpful. There are two major changes in my Literacy Narrative Part 3 essay, both inspired by my comic. First, I was able to use more vivid language in the new version to make my narrative more engaging. Although this seems to be the trend of all revising process, having converted the text narrative in the form of a visual medium beforehand definitely makes the revision on language easier. For example, in my original version of the essay, I wrote, “whenever I felt like letting my thoughts fly away, they always ended up hitting the walls they built.” When visualizing this part of the narrative through comic, I chose to depict a bird locked up in a cage to symbolize my helplessness in that situation. This image, then, surprisingly inspired me to reframe the sentence in a more engaging way: “whenever my thoughts struggled to break free from the iron chains, hopping and flapping desperately to find a way out, they always ended up hitting the towering walls of rules, wounded.” In conclusion, the comic allowed me to actually envision my narrative and through the imagery, I was able to further polish my wording. The other major revision is on the overall content of my narrative. During the peer review process, I realized that each of my peers gave very different interpretations of the theme of my narrative, which led me to reflect on how to make my theme clearer in the upcoming revision. Reading over my comic again, I found that I needed to emphasize more on my discovery of the power of combining visuals and written texts, which is the intended overarching theme of both my essay and comic. Therefore, I went back to my alphabetic text and strengthened this idea through reframing sentences for emphasis. I also noticed that the second part of my original essay was a bit unrelated to my theme, so in my revised version, I focus more on portraying how I learnt to incorporate images and words to overcome difficulties I met when reading and writing. It really surprised me that viewing visual mediums like comics seemed to be a quite “sensory” process, yet it actually contributed to the overall logic and structure of my text narrative.
The literacy narrative assignment undoubtedly helped me meet several aspects of the learning outcomes of this course. Having revised the essay three times (including the comic creation process), I learnt that writing is an ongoing process that every time we go back to the text, something new would come up and be changed. The repeated editing is, indeed, the indispensable process of creating a successful and thought-through essay. Moreover, as aforementioned, I was inspired by visual elements to polish the language and identity tensions of my narrative. And this process of jumping back and forth between visuals and alphabetic text and generating new ideas from it is exactly the demonstration of visual thinking strategies.
Joyce Xu 