WRITING FOR NEW MEDIA
Module 5
Writing the Reflection
Objectives
- To help you pick a particular experience as point of reflection
- To introduce narration for writing.
- To introduce description for writing.
Methods
- Critical thinking.
- Note taking.
Introduction
The three essays that you were required to read in Module 4 highlight distinct possibilities for reflection, not just in terms of form, but in terms of content. In the previous module you read those texts primarily in terms of the form: what does the introduction contain, what does it do in the body, and how does it close the essay itself.
But in the process of looking at the form, you are also looking at the contents of the essays.
An important thing to see is the distinct difference in the content of those reflections. “Growing Into Manhood” is a reflection on gender (growing up male), but it begins a place—the particular context within which the growing up happens. Notice too how the discussion on gender and context, ends with an awareness of social class.
Meanwhile, “Straightening Our Hair,” while also about gender, uses a common experience within a particular ethnicity or race. Here, you’re not looking at context specifically, as you are looking at age or generation, and race and ethnicity. Of course, as we know by now, social class plays a part in that discussion, too.
Of all the three reflection essays “In Search of Fear” is the one written most recently, and also the one most difficult to write. It’s difficult because it decides to reflect, not on an aspect of the self, or a place, or one particular moment or story. Instead it decides to focus on the bigger concept of fear, based on how he has experienced it, and how it happens in many ways and forms.
All these reflections though provide you some models for writing your own reflection, which is what you’re doing through this module.
What do you want to talk about?
The form of the reflection (beginning-middle-end, introduction-body-conclusion) are in the previous module. This module looks at helping you decide on what you’d like to talk about in longer form.
For this class, the reflection is 900 words to 1,200 words. This should give you enough space to talk in depth about your chosen subject.
How do you choose a subject for your reflection? Here’s a guide for deciding on a subject.
Your subject needs to be something that is unique to you as a person, maybe because it is different from other people’s experiences, or different form their experience of the same thing. From the sample essays, it can be one particular ritual or tradition that made you think about who you were as a person; or it can be about a particular place that made your upbringing different; or it can be a concept that has dominated your sense of self or which you’ve thought a lot about. You can go beyond these things of course, and decide on, say, a particular moment that was important because it made you think about where you stand, or who you are as a person.
You can also choose based on one of the aspects of the self. Maybe you’d like to expand further on one of the short reflections you submitted from Module 3. This is totally doable, and gives you something to start from. But you would need to shift your attention from an object, to an experience. Something that to you is important to flesh out so you might understand yourself better, but more importantly, so your reader might learn something from your experience.
You need to be able to talk about this subject at length. It’s that experience, or moment, or concept that you can chat with your friends about for hours on end, maybe something that you’ve even done a Google search on. What might help is if you actually are also interested in understanding this particular subject better, both in terms of what it means to you, but also what it indicates or highlights about our particular context.
Note Taking
- List down at least three different topics you’d like to write about for your reflection. Write in complete sentences.
- Look at the three pointers in the guide above relative to each of your three topics. On a scale of 1 to 10, decide on which part of the scale each topic falls as far as fulfilling each requirement in the guide. The higher the total score for a topic, the better.
- Go back to Module 4 and look at the process of reflection. Under each topic, list down more bullets to correspond to each part of the process.
How will you talk about it?
Reflection requires two distinct types of writing: narration and description.
Narration is your standard way of telling a story, and in the case of this subject, you need to be able to tell us its context: when did it happen, how did it happen, what were the circumstances surrounding that moment when it happened. Narration is something that’s second nature to us: it is how we tell another person about a story so that she might understand it better.
Key word: understand. Narration is key to all the writing you will do in this class (and in your life). It is your beginning-middle-end, your introduction-body-conclusion to every kind of storytelling, written and otherwise (please review Module 4 for it). Narration is about ensuring that what you are saying is logical, that one thing leads to the next, that one moment leads to another in way that makes sense to your reader.
Description is about finding the words to make your experience of what happens in that narration more vivid. This is about being able to specify and zero-in on how something made you feel, or how it made you act; it’s about being able to highlight how this particular experience was unique to you.
Easily, you will be told that description is about using adjectives—those words that talk about how something looks, or how it tastes, or how it feels. But a more productive way to think about description is not in terms of the words you can use—you can find a list of adjectives online after all—but instead to use your senses in particularly new ways to make your descriptions more specific, and more interesting.
The Senses Towards Description
We know of the five senses of hearing, sight, smell, touch, and taste. And we have a default way of using those senses for particular subjects or objects we need to describe, i.e., if it’s food, then you talk about how it tastes and smells, if you’re talking about a place you talk about how it looks, if you’re talking about a person, you talk about what they look or sound like.
These are the easy descriptions, the ones that are second nature to us. But what if when you taste food, what you talk about is not so much what it tastes like, but how it feels in your mouth? Or what it reminds you of? What if, when you talk about a person, you don’t talk about what they look like, but instead how they make you feel? What if instead of describing a place based on how it looks, you talk about what you can hear, and smell, and touch?
This would make for more interesting descriptions of moments and experiences, but also it would make it more unique to you.
Another way to level-up on the skill of description is to consider how your perception of something changes when you think of movement as a particular sense. What is moving around you, how are you moving in this particular context, what kind of movement does this particular place, experience, moment make you do?
Another thing you can test for better, more vivid, description is to think of feeling in relation to certain objects, moments, and experiences. So instead of describing literally how something looks, or talking about how a particular experience was new or different, you can flesh things out by talking about how it felt.
Note taking
- Go back to your three topics, and pick two that you really want to write about.
- Write two sentences about each topic that have to do with a reconfiguration of your sense-description, i.e., how this moment or experience looked, what it made you remember, what did it smell like, or what were you hearing at that particular moment?
- Write two sentences that talk about your feelings in relation to each topic. It can be a particular feeling in that moment, or how it makes you feel now as you reflect on it, or how you feel about it in the present.
You can submit your notes if you would like to get comments. You can also go right ahead and write your essay based on the outcomes of these notetaking activities. Please follow the format for all writing submissions that was in the Basics Module. Good luck! ***
