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Except where otherwise specified, you are not required to wait until the due date to complete and submit your work. Due dates are listed on the course calendar.
This project requires you to compose a roughly 2- to 3-minute video literacy narrative wherein you tell some story about your favorite communicative mode. Return to Chapter 1 of Writer/Designer to remind yourself of how to think about the modes. (You might jump to Milestone 5 below to see details about the finished product.)
What is a literacy narrative?
A literacy narrative is a story that describes how you learned to read, write, and/or compose. This might be a story about learning to read cereal boxes, a story about learning to write plays, or a story about learning to shoot photography. Some people will want to record their memories about the bedtime stories their parents read to them, the comics they looked at in the newspaper, their first library card, or their first iPod. Others will want to tell a story about writing a memorable letter, learning how to sing, reading the Bible, publishing a 'zine,' sending an e-mail message, or becoming an expert at text messaging. Description courtesy of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (archived site, current site is at http://www.thedaln.org/.)
Your literacy narrative should be focused on your literacy with a particular communicative mode. If your favorite mode is the linguistic, then you could tell any 2- to 3-minute story that explains to us how you became literate in some component of reading, writing, or speaking. This might be an overview of your linguistic literacy, or perhaps a small moment (such as the time your 8-year old self wrote a series of love poems to Justin Timberlake, or the way your first writing teacher made you feel horrible about your writing skills, or the way you used to hide in the closet reading Harry Potter books....).
Your audience should be able to watch your literacy narrative and learn something about you and your favorite mode.
This is a short essay: Provide a proposal and outline for your proposed literacy narrative. The proposal should describe the topic you are addressing ("my literacy narrative will be about X") and then it should provide a description and/or outline for what your narrative will include ("in order to share my story about X, I will be doing the following....").
After (re)reading Chapter 6, as well as "How to Create Storyboards” and this handout, you will design your own storyboard for the video. (You can use a downloaded storyboard template from the previous link or create your own from scratch). You will be submitting these storyboards as part of Project 2, so hang onto them and/or scan them asap so you have a digital copy. Follow the best practices from the readings so as to create a storyboard that helps you compose. We will use this storyboard worksheet during our workshop in class.
See Milestone 5 below and get as close as you can, knowing you may need to do some revisions. To make this finished draft available for peer review, upload it to the video sharing service of your choice.
After peer review, write up a 300-word report that details what people liked, what they wanted to see changed, and what you intend to work on for the final draft.
Your final draft will be a 2- to 3-minute minute video composed in the software application of your choice. Your video can include moving images or stills (or both!). It must include sound. If you want to borrow hardware equipment, you can borrow it from USC Upstate Media Services.
Your video must tell us a story (or stories) of how you became literate with a particular communicative mode, and/or your experience with literacy in a particular mode. See "what is a literacy narrative?" at the top of this page for more information. The final video must be uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo (or other video sharing site of your choice).
Based on our in-class discussions, your final draft will be assessed on the following:
This is a short essay: Explain why you made the choices that you did. This is your chance to rhetorically analyze your own work and sell us on the fact that you used the right rhetorical strategies given the rhetorical situation.
Your short essay will be assessed on the following:
Creative Commons License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Adapted from an assignment by Kristin Arola http://arola.kuurola.com/355/fall12/project3.html