I wrote a great deal about what I learned in this class. I revised that writing and I re-wrote it. Then I realized I didn’t want to rely on written text, I really wanted to make a video to express my thoughts; the piece above was going to be a component of that video. In the end, I decided to leave it as it is. Why?
I think that the natural speech I use in this version, after having recorded about 40 takes, speaks to the heart of what I learned and highlights the impact it had on me as a student. Sure there are moments when I feel like my word choice could be better, there are moments when I pause as I am trying to read what I had written, but what the tone of my voice says for me with its pitch, emphasis, and those awkward moments is sincere. I think that breaking it up, by patching together the various takes, and combining with it images and text as I had considered—without the time and the freedom to expand it into a much longer work—would diminish the candid nature of what I had to say about my experience in English 239.
I chose the video effect for two reasons. First, it went with the many images I had planned to incorporate. Second…I still *hate* talking in a video. Maybe this is my first step in getting over that?
What I didn’t say in this version of the video, is that composing in these new ways deepened my understanding of how complex composing multimodal work really is; doing so changed how I think about what thoughtful construction and various modes and styles of communicative weight can achieve.
Clearly, I still have a great deal to learn, but everything we read in this course and all of the resulting discussions are something I will revisit often and it is my hope that it will give me further insight in to the broadened potential of my future work.
nicely said and done, Susan!