Author: Larkin Meehan

Well, this is it. I’m done. I feel as though this course has flown by; I have so many more places that I could go with the pieces that I’ve created this past semester.

I would say that there are two categories when it comes to becoming a better writer; the first being how good you are content-wise, and the second being about the fundamentals. Content-wise I grew as a writer this semester because I’m better aware of the fact that people are interested in what I’m really interested in. Throughout the process, my peers just kept asking me for more. More on the specifics regarding my relationship with my sisters, more on what I was feeling at the time, more about the why. On a slightly more boring note, fundamentally, I grew this semester because I have gotten better at playing with my drafts. I have always struggled with heavily revising pieces, letting go of previous brain-children. I like to think that all my first drafts are perfect and don’t need any radical revision, but that is rarely the case.

My blog group played a huge part in how far I’ve come this semester, and I want to take that newfound strength of being able to listen to and trust me peers forward with me onto the capstone. Trusting people, especially when it comes to your personal writing, is scary and hard. It’s difficult to hear people do anything but sing your praises, and, when they don’t, it’s difficult to imagine that they might be right.

I can’t wait to see what the next three semesters in the writing minor have in store for me.

My site!

So far in this process, I’ve only really thought about my project as a bunch of individual pieces as opposed to one cohesive portfolio. I haven’t thought much about my overall website layout and what I want my overall portfolio to convey to the reader. Honestly, just thinking about it gives me a bit of a headache. After reading this chapter, however, I’m feeling a little bit better because I now have a basic checklist of what exactly I’m supposed to be working on.

Feedback, whether it’s your own or someone else’s, can be really overwhelming. Going through it with specific concerns/questions in mind, however, can make it seem like a lot less information that you have to weed through. I love the last page of this chapter where they give you specific questions to consider: for example, ‘What are the most important changes I need to consider as I revise?’ I’m definitely going to create a list of important things to focus on when I’m going back into my original piece, or my final project.

The only time that I’ve ever had to revisit a project this much has been with art as opposed to writing. I’ve never had to completely rework a piece of writing, but doing this has made me think so much more about my overall topic. Even though I’m keeping the same audience for my two pieces that I’ve started so far, they’re both very different in almost every other way, forcing me to rethink what I want my overall point to be regarding my relationship with my sisters. Writing is more similar to art than I often realize–one piece is almost never perfect, but instead always has room to grow.

So far, I have been super back and forth with what I’m going to do. Not so much what piece I am going to work with–that’s been the same from the start–but instead what I’m going to do with it. My original piece was written for an English 325 class about growing up with the “perfect” younger sister. At first, I wanted my first re-purposing assignment to be a short story about me and Julia when we were little; specifically, I wanted it to be about how it was when we found different things to be passionate about that we really became friends. However, after reading a bunch of parenting articles on “how to raise stellar sisters!!” I found that it’s apparently super unhealthy to give your daughters titles. I.e. I am the “artsy one,” Julia is the “athletic one,” Clare is the “one that sings,” and Cecily is, well, “the youngest.” (Oh, yeah, I don’t think that I mentioned that I am the oldest of four girls.

So now I am off on a different route. I am instead going to put my energy into writing a creative nonfiction piece on being the oldest sister and all the twists and turns that go along with that title. I mainly decided to do this after realizing that almost every single article that I came upon that had to do with sister dynamics was meant for the parents. How lame. Why is no one writing articles for the sisters themselves? So often, I feel like it’s way harder for us to tolerate us than for my mom or dad to tolerate us. I mean, they’re not the ones sharing a bathroom with Julia, or being the team captain of a team that Clare is on, or patiently explaining to Cecily why I do not feel comfortable with her barging in on the low-key parties I would throw in the basement from time to time. I would have loved to read an article by a (semi) cool older sister on how to handle your siblings like three years ago. I feel like it maybe would have saved me some sanity.

The next roadblock I’m going to have to get around is where this article/blogpost/whatever would best be published. I want high schoolers/some middle schoolers to have access to it, and, quite frankly, all my friends (I say my friends and not me because I was a total nerd) really read in high school was their Facebook feeds and, every now and then, some Seventeen Magazine. If anyone has any ideas, they’d be much appreciated.

Growing up, one of my all-time favorite authors was Patricia Polacco. And if I was ever forced to choose my favorite of her books that lined my pink polka-dotted bookshelf, my answer would have been Thank You, Mr. Falker. When I read this assignment, I decided to go back and look at it after all these years to see if I still thought it was “all that.” And, honestly, I think I love it even more now.

Patricia Polacco illustrates all of her books herself. Each page’s illustration beautifully coincides with the writing. If you didn’t love the characters just from reading the story, you would definitely love them after flipping through the physical book. Each page is yet another colorful painting that makes you want the characters come alive just so you can give them a hug.

However, it’s not just the illustrations that make Patricia Polacco’s books so great. Thank You, Mr. Falker begins with Trisha’s grandfather giving her a book with a dollop of honey on top of it. He tells her to taste the honey and Trisha responds that it tastes sweet. Her grandfather answers, “‘Yes, but so is knowledge, and knowledge is like the bee that made the sweet honey, you have to chase it through the pages of the book!'”

Throughout the rest of the book, Trisha’s grandparents pass away and she finds herself feeling very alone and struggling with reading. It isn’t until Mr. Falker comes along and understands why she is struggling and appreciates her and tells her that she is smart that she finally begins to feel comfortable with herself again. The story ends with Trisha learning how to read and running up to her room, putting a dollop of honey on the same book that her grandfather had a few years before, and saying those same words out loud to herself.

Thank You, Mr. Falker is a work of creative non-fiction. Of course, I didn’t realize this when I was in fourth grade, pouring over its pages. I barely even knew the difference between non-fiction and fiction. Now, going back to one of my childhood favorites, I can better understand how brilliant it is. Thank You, Mr. Falker is a true story about how Patricia Polacco learned how to read. The book comes full circle, starting with a happy, carefree girl, then depicting a hard struggle she had to go through, and coming back to the happy place she began at. Her “happy place” is represented by the honey on the book, and her struggles are outlined by conversations with bullies and descriptions of how worthless and unappreciated she felt.

I would love to emulate Patricia Polacco’s work. I think that it is fun and easy to read, but also really timeless and important. She perfectly captures the voice of young Patricia in third person, something which isn’t easy to do. Her illustrations create a child-friendly dynamic, but the theme is one that any person can relate to–the idea of not fitting into a certain set of standards. I find Patricia Polacco’s Thank You, Mr. Falker to be an excellently written book and also intellectually/artistically engaging.

Sadly, my copy is at home on my (no longer pink polka-dotted) bookshelf, but I did find a youtube video of someone reading it out loud so you can see the illustrations!

The first chapter of Writer/Designer, a book by Kristin Arola, Jennifer Sheppard, and Cheryl E. Ball, talks about the different types of modes that we see in everyday life- whether that be with advertisements, articles, or just in the way that we talk to others.

There are five types of “modes” that this book mentions. They are as follows:

Linguistic: the use of language (written or spoken words) – a good example of the linguistic mode is a novel. In novels, the authors do not use pictures or spacial awareness in order to convey their ideas. Instead, they stick with words; this includes the “organization of writing or speech into phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc.”

Visual: the choices involved with the color, layout, style, size and perspective of images that readers see – an example of the visual mode is a flyer or billboard (basically anything with visual information)

Aural: the sound that accompanies whatever we might be watching – i.e. music, sound effects, silence, tone of voice, volume

Spatial: the physical arrangement; the arrangement, the organization and the proximity between people or objects – an example of using the spatial mode would be how a website is organized or how a brochure might be folded

Gestural: the way that movement (i.e. body language) can make meaning; this includes facial expressions, hand gestures, body language and interaction with other people – when giving a speech, it’s extremely important to be aware of the gestural mode.

The book explains that most advertisements are “multimodal”, meaning they use two or more modes to help them get their point across. For instance, a billboard is not only visual, but it also uses text (linguistic) and the arrangement of the text and the images is well thought out, making it spatial as well.

Over the past few days, I’ve been on the lookout for multimodal examples. Here are a few that I came across:

• I’m in a graphic narrative class, so almost everything that we read is at least three modes – spatial, visual, and linguistic. I’m reading the book Persepolis for the first time and am amazed at how much thought went into each page design.

•  My friend shared a video on Facebook from Refinery29’s page about Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec. The video involved the gestural mode, as the entire video was clips of the character Leslie Knope (so gestures, body language etc.). The video was also an example of aural mode, as there was background music playing in addition to Leslie talking. It was visual because the perspective and style of each clip had to be chosen and was also, for a similar reason, spatial– the creator of the video had to decide the order of the clips shown. Finally, the video is also linguistic, as Leslie Knope and other characters are talking the entire time. Therefore, I do think that this video (an other videos like it) cover all 5 modes.

https://www.facebook.com/refinery29/videos/10154584155102922/

• Snapchat has a feature where you can see various news articles above your friends’ stories. They have everything from CNN to Cosmo. When you open them, each one of these mini articles comes with sound (making them aural) and the background of the front page of them is usually a creative picture or comic (visual) accompanied with text (linguistic). The spatial mode is important to make the mini article easy/fun to read (the placement of the images vs. text). The only mode that not every single one of them uses is gestural, but because some of the articles have videos of people attached, gestural is often included as well.
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After completing this exercise, I realized that almost everything that we see and read is multimodal – all the way from the cookbook on my shelf to the snapchats that I watch in the morning. We, as humans, have been using the multimodal technique for as long as we’ve been around. Even the cavemen had hieroglyphics in addition to drawings.

How the modes are used within the texts and how the artists choose to style each design differently does contribute to how different they all are. For example, the New York Times definitely would use different fonts and different layouts than a news source such as Refinery29.