Literacy History Blog - #1

Literacy History Blog!

Hello! My name is Luis Jaime, and I am a third year Media Arts major. I have a love of video editing, comic book media, and writing. Process has been slow on writing more original projects, but I am trying to actively get the ball rolling as soon as I can. A class called ‘Contemporary Literacies’ seemed to be a perfect fit for me, considering that while I am literate, I still have much to learn about the way others read/write, and I still have a lot to learn about how I do it myself. In this first blog, I will kind of explain my relationship with literacy and the way it helps me with my major and what I am doing right now.

As a kid, I was inspired into becoming literate by my mother and father, who took my education seriously and encouraged me when they saw I was doing well. If I remember correctly, the level I was reading at in either the 6th or 7th grade was pretty high, which indicated that I should keep doing what I’m doing while continuing to learn. Reading aloud in class is something I enjoy a lot because part of my literacy to me, is understanding the emotions conveyed on paper. Once I did this frequently in middle school, I began to become a better reader, and more appreciative of the way stories are written. 

I don’t do much recreational reading nowadays, but I still try to put a lot of effort into the way I write, as I care about the reading experience for the audience/those on the outside. Of the earliest experiences I had with literacy, comic books and graphic novels played a role in my youth to bolster my vocabulary, and show me how dialogue can move from left to right, on different quadrants of a page. Sometimes the speech bubbles even overlapped, which is realistic to the way people speak in our world. It did appear confusing to me at first when these bubbles cut each other off, but my dad would typically be the one to teach me that it wasn’t that the two characters were saying the same thing at the same time, rather someone stopping midway as someone else began to speak.

My appreciation for reading comic books and writing is an attribute that has shaped the major I’m studying as well. While I love the technical side of film with editing and cinematography, the most important thing to me is that a story is fleshed out and well-written. I won’t roll any cameras unless I’m confident in what I’ve written and had others read. If anything I put to paper sounds unnatural, or robotic, I know that the people I’m working with may have a tough time delivering a good performance. It’s my job as a director and writer to get the best I can out of an actor with an appealing and careful script, one that avoids seeming too fake.

As a literate person, I feel grateful to have had and still have a good education to keep me on my toes in a time where work and school may cut away from my chances to read any books on the back-burner. I continue to enjoy reading aloud when I can, and read over all of my work. Sometimes when I tweak it, it may still need work, but I will keep trying to improve the way I read and write everyday. My mother and father still encourage me, and while not as hands-on now that I am an adult, they fuel my drive to keep typing on a keyboard or writing with a pencil.