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

introduction

The personal narrative is a common paper to be taught in first-year composition classes.  Many times it is the first paper of the semester because we instructors believe that it is the easiest paper for students to write.  Robert Connors explained that personal writing is especially important for first year composition students because,

Learning that one has a right to speak, that one’s voice and personality have validity, is an important step—an essential step [in becoming part of the world of written discourse].  Personal writing, leaning on one’s own experience, is necessary for this step, especially when one is being encouraged to enter the conversation at age eighteen. (154)

So personal writing is a way for students to take that first step into the world of written discourse. Personal writing allows students some agency because it allows them to use their own experience.  But personal writing can also be limiting.  Students are usually given assignments that require them to explain the significance of the event they have narrated.  This requirement leads to papers with titles such as “My First Car Wreck” or “The Day I Became Homecoming Queen.”  While these events are certainly significant to the students, forcing the students to tell the story on paper (unless the students are already comfortable as writers) can make the narratives themselves very predictable and boring.  We often assume that these boring papers are the writers’ faults.  They have not done their best writing, so the story is lacking.  However, I want to suggest that the fault is instead in the way we instructors have limited the students’ space to construct their narratives. 

We are living in a world full of texts, but very few of the texts our students see on a daily basis look like the papers we ask them to produce.  The New London Group warned us years ago that our methods of assigning student texts was limiting our students; “Literacy pedagogy. . . has been a carefully restricted project—restricted to formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language” (61).  If we want to allow students the space to construct their best personal narratives, we must realize the fact that, “literacy pedagogy now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (61).  Through an examination of my own narrative practices when given the space to construct in audio and visual design, I intend to argue that the different media can work better for different student composers and should be made available to them at some point in the composition course, preferably in the beginning or with the personal narrative. The mediums of audio and video, as well as other visual and auditory mediums, can be effective ways for composition teachers to approach personal narrative assignments at all levels of composition but may be especially important for first-year composition.  What follows are suggestions for how to make the multimodal narrative an effective first year composition assignment.