Samar Normand

Assignment #1: Multimodal Language and Literacy Narrative

In my junior year of high school, our final assignment was to create a piece of art: poem, song, writing, etc, on topic of The Great Gatsby. I chose to make a mini booklet (2-4 pages) of different short poems relating to the different perspectives of Gatsby, Daisy, the Green light. I spend hours attempting to come up with a “good poem”, after speaking to my father who writes poetry in his own time, I became inspired and began to find a groove to my writing. When I take the subway in the city, I will often see short poetry at the end of the cart and I always stop to take a photograph. Reading these little words of wisdom, on a day where I feel down, truly is enlightening, encouraging and inspiring. A key moment language and literacy moment I had was during the summer of 2019. I was sitting alone in my grandmas apartment and thinking about how lonely I felt, especially due to social media. I sat on the corner of the bed and wrote my first short poem in 10 minutes. “Its a sick ailing feeling, opening these devices which should be used as tools of comfort but instead obliterate pure beauty. We gaze into the very souls of these instruments longing for acceptance, we crave synthetic validation, tangible moments become lost and passionate bonds are broken. It does more than destroy interconnection, but can shatter an innocent beautiful mind. Time is wasted scrolling mindlessly through distorted images and false personas. The touch between one and another is slowly fading. It will taunt your inner being and trick your mind into thinking you adore it, when you only ever admired the feeling of affinity.” — This is a poem I felt very overwhelmed but very proud of. It was very emotional writing about this as I have my fair share of struggles with social media and at times it is hard to accept the truth. Someone who contributed and connected to my language and literacy was my senior year high school English teacher. Mr. Abrams was always incredibly supportive and creative, he encouraged me to dig deeper and keep writing. 

To: Professor Evans, and my dear classmates

During writing this assignment, I know I am writing this for everyone in the class to see my experience. So I need to make sure my tone and my format and language are not too formal but not too casual, I have to control in a sense of storytelling. So the format of my writing will be presented as a story with my thoughts included and I also attached some pictures for people to have an idea of what I am really talking about instead of just lines of sentences.

As I am writing my assignment, I am actually kind of lost and not really happy with what I wrote because it was messed up, the lacking of vocabulary had cause me to fail in expressing my feeling and thoughts about what I saw and experienced. Also, the structure of this assignment is not assigned well and it might cause the readers to get lost in my point and idea. Also, I am always repeating the same idea over and over again in my writing, I guess it was a bad habit that I always had. It’s existence just to fill out the word requirements lol. But that’s something I am working to get it out. So from this assignment, I realized how important it is to start my writing as an outline to list what I should write in each paragraph and then start writing. I think it will make my idea clearer and try to use different vocabulary next time in my description.

I can see that my writing style and practices really change based on different rhetorical situations since I know what am I presenting and the audiences that I need to persuade to show my writing in the way that fits the situation best.