This semester of English 101 has taught me an array of techniques and has given me a hands-on experience at constructing a multimodal autoethnographic project. Students began the academic year having to come up with an idea for their project in which I chose the political status crisis of Puerto Rico. The title of my project was “Puerto Rico: The 21st Century Colony” and my purpose was to exploit the fact that Puerto Rico is a colony under modern American Imperialism that has been masked for years as a so called “Commonwealth”. I chose this topic as I felt a bit nostalgic about my home and had realized that after years of studying and taking classes of the history of Puerto Rico many primary sources point out the unjust treatment of PR by the US but never give the relationship a name. I felt a moral obligation to speak out, analyze objectively, and prove a point worth the time and consideration of any citizen or resident of Puerto Rico. We are a small island, we have no representation, we have not vote, but we are loud and our voice will be heard.
The multimodal project consisted of two webpages. The first one was a personal page about the author (one-self) and periodic blogs about our progress. The second webpage is the project itself containing a landing page, review of literature, infographic, interviews, artifacts, presentation, analyses pages, and a reflection. Organization was key as navigation and spacing were of optimal importance when engaging the audience. I learned how to approach the reader with new form of rhetoric with the facilitation of the multimodal project allowing me to engage in a variety of ways in order to immerse the reader in another perspective. I acquired a new style of writing where I would gather information and shape the display of said information with the use of rhetorical analysis to reach the audience. In order to do this, I needed to identify my situation, purpose, and stakeholders in relation to this project to truly adopt the eyes and hands of the creator of an autoethnography. The real challenge was after the gathering of all the information. How can I make this topic interesting or how can I make this webpage visually pleasing to make someone want to read it? With the help of the class books “Writer/Designer” (by Arola, Sheppard, and Ball) and “Writing and editing for digital media” (by Brian Carroll) I was able to use space, images, buttons, text color, titles, and other formatting to create an enticing page any viewer would want to read. For a webpage one must consider that the attention span of the audience is ridiculously low forcing one to write in a certain manner being concise and straight to the point thus maintaining the grasp of concentration on the webpage. Overall, I am proud that I was able to take on an un-explicit social-political problem that has roamed the shadows and bring it to the eyes of the public while alluring an audience with a completely different manner of approach, a multimodal autoethnography. I learned about webpage design, a new rhetoric of expression, and the multimodal style/way of presenting a point of view for a purpose greater than myself. |