Photo Credit: Stanczak, Lael. 2016.
First Chapters
After reading the first chapters of Writing and Editing for Digital Media and Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects I have a better understanding of the fundamentals of writing, the basics of multimodal projects, and how both of those things relate to this class. The first chapter of Writing and Editing for Digital Media gave me a clear idea of the basic do's and don'ts of writer. Although most of the tips about writing in this chapter were pretty straight forward it was nice to be reminded of what helps and what hinders your work. It made me reflect on my own writing style and made me think about the words I choose and how I use them in my writing. After reading this chapter I became more aware of my diction, syntax, organization, and reasons behind why I'm writing what I'm writing. Plus it was nice to know that even professional writers procrastinate and get writers block often.
The other book Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects was helpful in gaining some more knowledge on what multimodal projects actually are and how most content in out world is multimodal. After learning the five modes: linguistic, visual, aural, gestural, and spacial, I realized that most projects and work that I do for school is multimodal. Making a presentation or a video or even writing a lab report with graphs are all forms of multimodal media. This chapter also brought awareness to the fact that in making any type of project you have to be aware of your audience because something that makes sense to you may not make sense to the people you are presenting to.
The other book Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects was helpful in gaining some more knowledge on what multimodal projects actually are and how most content in out world is multimodal. After learning the five modes: linguistic, visual, aural, gestural, and spacial, I realized that most projects and work that I do for school is multimodal. Making a presentation or a video or even writing a lab report with graphs are all forms of multimodal media. This chapter also brought awareness to the fact that in making any type of project you have to be aware of your audience because something that makes sense to you may not make sense to the people you are presenting to.
What Makes a Good Infographic?
After playing with Piktochart and seeing just how many options there are to make an infographic I've realized that I need to understand what exactly makes a good infographic? From my own experience there is quite a lot of information that I want to include in my infographic so my biggest problem is avoid clutter. A good infographic isn't packed with text but usually has helpful graphics and charts. Balance and organization are also important for a good infographic to make it aesthetically pleasing and easy to follow. Finally consistency is very important with infographics and consistency applies to colors, text, spacing, and sizing. There are many things to pay attention to when making an infographic so overall it can be difficult to create a consistent, organized, and easy to read infographic.
Interview Questions
In no particular order my interview questions are:
- Give a general timeline of your overseas experience. (I realize that this isn't actually a question)
- What did you expect the US to be like when returning?
- How did it differ from your expectations?
- What do you respond when people ask where you're from?
- Do you identify more with American students or international students?
- Has it been hard adjusting to life in the US beyond the basic adjustments to college?
- Do you see yourself living in the US after college?
- Any other thoughts or comments of being an American TCK returning for college?
Stakeholders
Stakeholders are audience members who either have a certain interest or an importance of the topic to them. My auto ethnography could potentially have many stakeholders beyond the scope of our classroom. The topic of third culture kids returning to their home country for college has a wide variety of people it could attract. Stakeholders for my topic include: third culture kids looking into returning or looking for support in returning, friends of these kids who want to better understand their friend's situation, parents of these kids, educators who want a better grip on reverse culture shock, international schools that want to better prepare their students, counselors who want to better help these students, etc. My auto ethnography topic has many stakeholders but its realistic reach is probably not that much further than the classroom setting.
My Philosophy of Writing
I have never been in love with writing but that is not because of the principle of it is mainly because most of the times that write I have to do it and my grade depends on it. I’m not great at grammar and the nuances of writing but I can really enjoy it, as long I want to write about my topic and it’s not something that I’m uninterested in. The fact that we get to chose our own topics in English 101 has made me appreciate writing again because I truly am curious and passionate about my topic. My philosophy of writing is that writing is hard for everyone and is something so personal and objective that it is difficult for any writer to come to the point where they think that their piece is perfect. Writing can always change and improve whether it is because there is new information on the topic or because it can simply be put into better words. I enjoy writing on topics where I can put my voice, my ideas, and my opinions into the writing, if it’s non-fiction, because I think it makes for better writing and it produces work that I am proud to put my name on. Beyond non-fiction I also like writing fictional stories that cover topics and themes that I am excited about. Overall writing is not my strongest point but I do appreciate writing on occasion especially when I have a passion for the topic that I am writing on.
After English 101
I'm not sure how I would use my domains after this class. I do know that I will want to showcase my autoethnography to some friends, especially friends whom the topic pertains to, and maybe my family. As for this domain, if in the future I want to work on my blogging skills or just make this blog appear more interesting I may add a few more pages and pictures to it. This would be important to me because if someone were to google me I am the only Ainsley Stanczak that come up which can be both a pro and a con of having a unique name. Because this blog is likely to come up as one of the links of the first page of 'google-ing' me I want my writing and work here to be something I'm proud of and beyond that I just want this website to look presentable and be something that I appreciate doing. After this class the most likely way that I'll end up sharing my domains with people is if my blog and/or autoethnography come up in conversation in which case I would be open to sharing my website with people who are genuinely interested in what I have to write on my autoethnography topic. This blog page specifically may be good to share with people who are considering taking English 101 so they can see examples of what you have to do in this section of the class and some of my thoughts and ideas about the in class assignments.
Discourse Communities
An obvious discourse community that my autoethnography touches on is the community that is third culture kids. As I've found in my research and interactions in my life TCKs tend to share a lot of traits and values in common mostly surrounding open-mindedness and some form of extroversion as they typically have moved around often in their lives. I feel as though these TCKs are the main stakeholders in my project but, as mentioned above, there are a lot of people who could benefit to be aware of the information that my project covers, such as educators, other college students, and counselors. Each discourse community that make up the audience for the information that my autoethnography covers would have a different way of interpreting the topic. For example, educators may pay more attention to how moving back for TCKs affects their habits and stress levels in reference to the classroom setting as to better support or understand students in that situation. Other college students would pay more attention and learn more from how reverse culture shock affects TCKs in a social and emotional setting as to better understand a new friend or try to empathize more with TCKs they may know. Finally counselors would probably interpret the information in the most well-rounded way to get a complete picture of what may be affecting a TCK who comes to them for help. Most of these groups would develop information on this topic in a relatively personal way because each TCK is in a unique situation and deals with different levels of stress due to reverse culture shock. Educators, however, may approach construct knowledge on the topic with less personal interactions and research due to the limitations of a classroom setting. The needs and demands that I felt while writing this topic were that I needed to cover social, emotional, and intellectual affects of reverse culture shock and beyond that I felt as though I needed to stress that each person is an individual who will have different ideas, opinions, and reactions to returning 'home' because each situation is unique.