Self-Analysis: A Call for Multimodality in Personal Narrative Composition
 ~   Sonya Borton (University of Louisville)  ~

  

conclusion

So what does all of this say about making available multiple modes of composition when teaching the personal narrative?  It is true that I could have written the stories that I composed in the audio and video projects. In fact, my uncle who is a writer told me that he loved my projects but he would have chosen the pen if he had been composing them.  And for him, the pen probably would have been the best choice.  However, I don’t have his talent for capturing the richness of other voices in words the way he does.  For me, capturing my family in audio interviews and pictures and video clips was a much more effective method. My narrative was allowed to “assume a special performative power and an aesthetic dimension through multimedia” (Hull 231).  I also had to take into account many of the same things that I would have had to consider in a written composition.  I had to have an introduction where I pulled my audience in.  I had to have a thesis so that my audience would know the purpose of investing their time in my project.  My narrative had to follow a logical path to its conclusion, and as I have already discussed, the conclusion had to leave my audience with something to remember.  Therefore, even though the mediums of audio and video gave my narrative an aesthetic quality that I couldn’t have achieved on paper, I still used many of the same analytical skills a written essay would require.
         Another way that my projects followed the same conventions as a traditional essay was the editing process.  I composed countless drafts of both projects changing a word here, a sentence there, a picture somewhere else. I had to think carefully about the construction of my essay because each individual part played an important role in creating the meaning I was trying to achieve.  My essays were peer reviewed by both classmates and family members with each peer review resulting in new ideas for revising my essay.  And overall, I spent many more hours planning and composing these essays than I have ever spent on planning and composing a traditional essay.

The New London Group tells us that, “The challenge is to make space available so that different lifeworlds—spaces for community life where local and specific meanings can be made—can flourish” (70). The mediums of audio and video also allowed me a greater opportunity to analyze the lifeworld of my family than the written narrative would have allowed.  While any literacy narrative assignment that I have ever seen does ask the writer to consider the practices which made the writer what he or she is today, both the audio and video projects allowed me the space not to just consider those practices but to include those practices in the forms of family members voices and pictures to create a keepsake for all my family members.  Knowing that I was creating something of lasting value for my family meant that I put more time, thought and effort into truly getting to the bottom of what was critical about artistic and musical literacies in my life.  I had to carefully consider if I was using their words and pictures and songs in the way they had intended.  I had to make sure they were not misrepresented in the pieces because they were not only part of the narratives; they were also part of my audience.  I might have shared a paper I had written on the topic with my mother or my husband, but it would have ended there.  These multimodal projects have a life even after they have been completed.
         I want to be clear that I am not advocating a course where students are forced to use these mediums to compose personal narratives.  That would be no more effective than forcing them to write narratives as they often are now.  My argument is that using visual and auditory mediums are more effective for some people than the traditional written essay. They require the same type of analytical reasoning as writing, and they are as effective (if not more so) in teaching the importance of carefully editing a composition. Composers of audio and video narratives (I imagine less “technological” mediums such as scrap books or collages would be much the same) would also have more at stake in their projects and would spend more time crafting the essays than the time and effort they typically spend on a written essay. Just as our cultural practices shape our lives, the modes in which we choose to compose shape our narratives.  Allowing students the space to choose how their narratives are constructed, gives them even more agency in the process.  And if Conners is correct that allowing students to compose what they know helps them to enter the conversation of academic discourse, allowing them to compose in a way they know can make them even more confident as they take that “essential step.”