Visual Literacy Narrative

To begin our semester together, and your career in freshman composition, you have the
opportunity to reflect on your reading and writing experiences thus far. You can choose
to discuss a certain time period, such as a school year, or a particular event in your life
which has led you to the reader and writer you are today. You can choose to look back
over particular experiences chronologically which are related and reflect on specific
events. Your goal is to reflect on your literacy experiences and develop an argument
about how those experiences have made you into the literate person you are today.

The Twist
Instead of crafting your argument through alphabetic text in traditional essay form, for
this assignment you will use visuals. You can use your own photographs, images from
magazines, or pictures from the internet. If you are using photographs I would suggest
working with digital photos so you can edit and crop, as well as have access to multiple
copies for revisions. If you are using original print photos I would suggest making copies
of them so you will have them for revisions. If you are using images that are not your
own before you document those sources (we will go over this in class). Your Visual
Literacy Narrative should identify 2-4 major points in your literacy history and address
the following:
1 The range of different literacy practices, values, and understandings
you have developed
2 How you have developed these literacies (where, how, with who)
3 Your feelings about these literacies

Developing A Thesis
As with any argument you will need a strong thesis. This will require some thinking
because you are working with visual text. This means you need to think about color,
layout, size, and contrast to state and organize your argument. We will discuss how
to develop a thesis in class.

Crafting your Visual Literacy

You can choose to present your visual literacy in any form that you wish. Feel free to be
as creative as you wish. You can make a poster board collage, make a book, create a
scrapbook, or create any thing else that will present your argument. Have fun with it.

Your Visual Literacy must answer the questions above, showcase 2-4 main points,
and contain at least 6 images. Remember this argument depends on your visual
construction. We will discuss visual design elements in class to assist you in constructing
your argument.

The Written Component

As part of your literacy project you will write an explanation to go along with your visual
essay. Your explanation should tell why you made the rhetorical choices that you did.
For instance why did you choose the colors or images that you did? Why did you arrange
them as you did? Your explanation should be at least 2 typed, double spaced pages.
Audience
The audience for your visual literacy narrative is your fellow 103 peers. By sharing your
literacy experiences with your fellow peers you can learn about each other and learn from
each other.