Lauren Farrington Portfolio Reflections

[:00] Title card--essay and video on-screen with white text reading “Essay v. Video.” Lauren voices over:

Lauren: Through this video, I’ll explore the differences between analyzing a text through print, being my poetry essay, or a video, being my e-poem.

[:13] Screen capture of a Google search, then of Lauren’s essay.

Lauren: For both my poetry essay and my e-poem, I looked at the poem “Making a Fist” by Naomi Shahib Nye.Through my eyes, through my experience, each medium--print or a video--offered me different ways of looking at the poem. 

[:33] Clips from the e-poem play.

Lauren: I was able to explain and explore different ideas in the poem and different themes in the poem based on how I would be able to compose them in either the essay or the video format. So for this video, I will mostly be focusing on composition and how that affects the final outcome of an analysis, and also how it affects the way we think about a poem.

[:59] Screen capture of the essay.

Lauren: I’m used to this particular print essay. Pamela Takioshi and Cynthia Self, in their article “Thinking About Multi-Modality,” define the traditional essay as consisting mainly of words on a page arranged into paragraphs. This flow of words is only occasionally interrupted by titles, headings, diagrams, or footnotes. So, the materials to compose an essay about poetry would include your words, words from other writers, and other words [indiscernible] that express the same or opposing ideas as your own, and the structure you choose to write in.

[1:28] Screen capture of the video editing software.

Lauren: In contrast, I was not very comfortable with adapting “Making a Fist” into a video. To be honest, before English 150, I would not have characterized a video as text, or assume that it could be read like text. Of course now, at the end of the course, I definitely believe it. I think my doubts came from the materials used to compose my e-poem, which seem so vastly different from the materials used to write my poetry essay.

[1:54] Image from a word document appears on-screen.

Lauren: In her article “Eye of the Beholder: An English teacher’s attempt to transform her teaching through digital video composing,” Mary Lee Nepps defines multi-modal text as mixing print, images, sound, video, and music. These materials seemed distinct and separate to me, and I needed to figure out how to put them together, whereas in the essay, it came naturally to me.

[2:20] Screen capture of a Word document.

Lauren: In my opinion, due to their materials, print essay limit themselves to particular purposes, as they are composed of the writer’s words, their ideal for argumentative or analytical writings, as they are very subjective to what the audience will take away from the piece of literature being written on. I know this is how I looked at my poetry essay. I wanted to write about Naomi Shahib Nye’s Arab-American culture seeping through the meaning of her poem, and through a print essay, I’m able to manipulate words to express my points how I intend them. How I combine words into sentences presents my ideas in a particular composition for the audience to digest. In my mind, print essays do not give the audience much leeway for their own points of view.

[3:05] Clips from the e-poem play again.

Lauren: In contrast, and as Takioshi and Self point out, “oral and video compositions can articulate meanings that are hard to capture with words.”

[3:14] Screen capture of Word document.

Lauren: In my e-poem, I chose to focus on a completely different theme from “Making a Fist.” Instead of focusing on Naomi Shahib Nye’s cultural background, I instead decided to focus on the universal nostalgia for childhood. This was my original idea for my poetry essay, but I feel like it lent itself more to the e-poem’s composition.

[3:33] Back to the editing software.

Lauren: My e-poem was the perfect medium as a combination of images, sound, and moving text lent itself to create outside images that could resonate with a variety of people's’ childhood. As in her article, “English Teacher Learning for New Times: Digital video composing as multi-modal literacy practice,” Susanne Miller describes how videos allow students to perform their knowing. She says [quote appears on-screen] “In orchestrating the visual, music, and narrative for a poetry video, for example, the teachers and their students performed their knowing; it was dynamic, evolving, and constructed.” My e-poem somehow felt more personal than my poetry essay to me, and I think that’s because I chose the specific materials that I wanted to connect with; however, when a reader watches my e-poem, they will not think of my connection, but they’ll think of their own, so it’s personal to everyone.

[4:23] Text appears on-screen reading “Audience’s Personal Connection: ??” 

Lauren: The relationship between writer and audience is less direct, and the relationship between video and audience is enhanced, allowing for more relatability.
[4:33] Title card re-appears.

Lauren: Ultimately, I enjoyed writing my poetry essay and crafting my e-poem. The composition of the two made me realize that print and video both have benefits and disadvantages. Sometimes one might be better to use than the other, and I’d be more comfortable with the materials of print; however, the materials of the video allowed for more creativity when trying to express certain ideas and feelings. 

[4:56] Back to the screen capture of the Word document, then clips form the e-poem.

Lauren: To me, poetry essay is more structured while e-poem is more abstract, so I think that a--my--“Making a Fist” poetry essay was better to analyze the poem through a certain lens and state my facts and my point, whereas my e-poem was better to show the feeling that I hoped the poem would arouse in the audience.