Peter D. Grondin 12/02/13 Noah Tysick English 111 Critical Reflection To be literate in the 21st century, is to be visually literate.

A quote from my multi-source essay from earlier this semester. I find this to be one of the more defining statements of my ams, as it basically sums up the point I am trying to make. I consider this statement to be my thesis because it reflects upon the mission of my paper. In writing my AMS, as well as most of the papers I write, I consider the introduction to be one of the most important paragraphs. The intro not only sums up the topic and purpose of your essay, but it is meant to grab the readers attention to interest them enough to keep reading. This I think, Is why the introduction is one of the paragraphs I struggle with the most. As I reflect upon the process in writing this paper, I recall writing and rewriting the intro two or three times throughout the paper. Whether or not this is true, I always feel like its the intro that determines the grade you get. I want the professor to be interested enough to want to keep reading, rather than feeling like they have to. Keeping this in mind I tend to start off my papers with two or three sentences that will either make you laugh, or make you wonder, either way, I find this tactic to be useful in grabbing the readers attention. Opposite of the introduction, is the conclusion, which I find to have a problem writing as well. I dont consider this paragraph to be nearly as important, but I think this too must be just

as catchy, as it is the last thing the professor will read. The conclusion to my multi source, I feel was not done to the best of my ability. I felt like everything I wrote wasnt able to sum up the topic the way I wanted it to. In writing the conclusion to any paper I write, I try to sum it up in a way that the reader has to sit and think for a minute, perhaps leaving them wanting to read the paper again. My problem with this paper I feel was that I just couldnt find a sentence to build the conclusion off of. I had such a problem I ended up not even writing a conclusion, and just used the last paragraph of the body text as my ending, which I guess worked for the most part, but I just wasnt happy with it. The only other problem I had in writing my AMS, wasnt even the actual writing, but rather the selecting of the sources I used. Source selection, I think, just may be the most critical part of constructing any paper. I feel like a paper can only be as good as its sources. This is where you get all your information, and poor information I feel, makes for a poor paper. A paper is only as good as its sources. To me this is the most crucial step in the writing process, and it is something I constantly struggle with. In doing my source selection for the AMS essay, I started by finding one good article that summarizes the topic, hit on all the key points, and had no real point of view on the subject. I used this source as a starting point, like a conversation topic, and selected sources based on what they contributed to the conversation. This is something I struggled with the most with this paper. I would choose my sources, be halfway through a rough draft, and then hit a wall and decide my sources werent contributing what they needed to, and end up spending hours looking for new sources. I did this about three times. Once I was happy with the sources, then I went through and found sub topics that I could build a kind of conversation off of.

When choosing my sources for this paper, I wanted to make sure that each source served a certain purpose, and answered specific questions. Once I chose my first article, in this case Visual Literacy in the Age of Participation, which was one of the articles we read as a class, I was able to outline what I wanted my other articles to do, including being able to agree with as well as disagree with. With these I try to form conversations between the articles, which is basically what the body of the essay consisted of. There were a few times that I was a few paragraphs into my paper, and decided that my sources didnt compliment each other, and I ended up starting over, choosing all new sources that I thought would work better together. This happens often in my writings but as I said before, a paper is only as good as its sources. The part of the process that seem to be less problematic for me is writing the body, or as I call it, the conversations between sources. In my AMS, the first two paragraphs consisted of a dialogue between Mackey and Martin, describing exactly why visual literacy is so important within the academic community and why integration into institutions curriculums should be of high priority. This is where I used two articles that complimented and agreed with each other. The next paragraph I used firsthand experience to detail why visual literacy is not supported by some faculty and administrators, and used this to build my next paragraph that focused on how to integrate it. As I found this to be one of the main problems with my topic, that most faculty dont have to know how or the resources to fulfill this integration. I went on to explain that librarians, teachers, and tech centers need to work together in completing this task. The article I found that contributed most to my paper was that of Stephanie Martins Close the Book, Its Time to Read, as it consisted of firsthand experience and how her students were able to contribute more to her class when using media and pop culture as a tool. Her

article went into detail about her struggle with the administration and not allowing her to use the media and visual tools in her classroom, as it was thought to be inappropriate and of no real use. I used her firsthand experience to demonstrate how this is still a problem, even in todays institutions and how media is still thought to be a recreational product instead of an academic tool. I centered in on the academic community as my audience, as this is where the problem lies. In constructing my paper, I wrote as if I was informing my own teachers on the importance of visual literacy, and tried to keep the focus of the information as it would apply to me and my own studies. For instance, I often tell people I learned more from watching the history channel than I ever learned in any history class in high school or college, for the sole reason that media has the ability to hold your interest in a way books cannot, as well as demonstrate meaning through relation of your own experience and lifestyle. Although media and visual literacy is becoming increasingly valued throughout our academic institutions, it is still thought to be senseless and inappropriate by some. In conclusion, the sole purpose of my AMS was to demonstrate the idea that as society progresses, so too must our ways of thinking and learning.