MA1
Major Assignment 1 Relection:
Major assignment 1 was my first dive into college essays and while it did shake my linguistic skill to the core. it allowed me to break out of my comfort zone and learn how to adapt to non-academic style essays. I should give some background on where i was writing essays so you can get an idea on how much i grew as a writer. My High school pushed the standard essay that is great for starting out with, but i had soon realized that any personality injected into the essay or non formal vocab would result in a lower grade. So i made essay after essay that completely lacked and sense of “me” in them. This greatly discouraged me to write in creative and challenging ways since i would just get a lower grade if i had tried. Starting MA1 not only did we have to write an essay about ourselves, but we had to do it in a multimodal format. In all of my 18 years of living i have never once written about me so this scared me greatly. Professor Ramos encouraged us to think outside the box and use non-standardized formats for the multimodal part as well. This majorly forced me to leave behind my standard essay that had worked for me for 4 years. I even tried to add a bit of personality to my essays although i had no idea how to do it. This assignment broke walls that i got so comfortable with my standardized essays and allowed me breath a bit of life into my essays and get more comfortable with multimodal assignments and my own voice.
Week 3 Discussion Post:
Before college, I’ve never heard of the term “Multimodal” in my life. And now i was asked to do a multimodal assignment!? All i knew was 5 paragraph essays, because that is what was drilled into me starting from the 1st grade. Intro, body 1,2,3, and conclusion is all i had in my literature arsenal. Reading *An Introduction to and and Strategies for Multimodal Composing* by Melanie Gagich really helped break down the walls and for the first time, i got a view into how to take these frightening and mysterious assignments on. When Gagich stated “For example, when you post an image to Instagram, you use technology (your phone) to snap a picture, an app to edit or modify the image, and a social media platform (Instagram) to share it with others” it finally clicked that i was writing multimodal literature all the time! Every time i sent a text with an emoticon or a meme to my friends i was actually participating in multimodal-ness. After that it did not seem so bad, and the curtains were drawn back. Well that was one major hurdle over, now I’d have to deal with something that I’ve been struggling with. How do i make essays sound like me? I’ve gotten so used to the classic 5 paragraph essay that i never really knew how to add my own flavor, so to speak, to a text. After i read *Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing* by Marjorie Stewart it helped me understand that it does not need to be a one big switch but i can work on it overtime. One piece of advice that really helped me was “Using a personal story as a frame for your essay can be an effective way to draw your reader into your ideas and then to help them reinterpret those ideas in the end” I never even thought that the reader might want to look at who is writing the text, and not only that, but it can help improve the overall flow of the text? Consider my mind blown. Using this knowledge hopefully i can now add a bit more personality into my essays.
