Reflection of Audio Recording of Digital Literacy Narrative

How the aural audio file component impacted my thinking about the alphabetic digital literacy narrative...

I did notice a couple small wording things I wanted to change when I was initially recording. It's interesting how much more those kinds of issues stand out when you're listening to your composition instead of reading it silently. I read over my paper many times before, but the wording in these two parts of the paper didn't stand out to me until I said them aloud.

Recording myself reading the essay made me think differently about the sound of words and syllables and the flow from one word to a sentence to a paragraph to a page. When you're just writing alphabetically, it's easier to get away with awkward or clunky sounding words paired in the same sentence. When the words are read aloud, however, they become much more obvious.

I think this third question relates to some of my experiences at the Hub (even though the writers there aren't younger). As humans, our primary form of communication is verbal. For this reason, a lot of people have an easier time expressing themselves verbally than they do on paper. This is why I typically ask people at the Hub to read their papers aloud to me--they catch way more of their own mistakes that way and have an easier time seeing if what they put on the paper matches up to what they were thinking at the time. This tactic applies to all writers, but I guess it could be extra helpful to young writers specifically since they don't have as much experience with writing and might be more accustomed to expressing themselves verbally.

As I was recording (or maybe after), I did think about how my choices in voice inflection, intonation, etc. could impact the way a listener perceived the information I was conveying to them. This adds a whole new level to the idea of "voice" in writing. Alphabetic writers need to really build up their characters or voice through word choice and sentence structure, but when a piece is read aloud, you can quite literally have the listener hear the narrator's voice exactly how you want them to by recording it that way.

Images to represent my preliminary thoughts about the digital literacy narrative:

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/old-computer-royalty-free-image/182906643

This image shows an old computer...I included it because this is what I wrote about in the intro paragraph to my digital literacy narrative, and I definitely spent some time thinking about the old computer we had when I was a little kid and trying to decide how I would describe it. I had a hard time translating this image in my head to alphabetic text because I couldn't precisely remember what the computer looked like (it was in our house like 15 years ago). And more broadly, in this intro paragraph I was trying to describe the way the computer room in my house made me feel as a child, and these sensations were difficult to translate to words.

These challenges are probably common ones. Most things we write about start as vague ideas or images in our heads and need to be conveyed or expressed with plain, alphabetic text. Can you ever use writing to make a reader feel the precise fear you felt at the age of seven when you sat in the scary, dark computer room in the basement? Probably not. Innately, writing alphabetically about feelings, smells, sights, and sounds that aren't universally experienced by every reader will be a challenge. So perhaps multimodal writing can be more effective. For example, if I had included that image, my readers would have seen immediately just what my family's computer was like.