Sa-Shai Daniels' Portfolio

Writing the Snapshot Memoir helped me to write a story that was interesting and entertaining as well as easy for readers to picture and imagine. I think that this is going to help me be a much better writer in the future which will make my more enjoyable for not only me but for others too. Over the duration of this project we were constantly forced to think about what we could do to make our memoir more detailed and how we could make it sound better to the reader. Normally when I write I’m focused on how I perceive my writing, but thinking about what other readers would think about my writing helped me improve my writing a lot. I learned to use the writing skills that I appreciate when I’m reading a book.

                The first step in this project was choosing a moment that I thought was worth writing about. This took a while because I hadn’t lived a very exciting life. Eventually I decided to pick a moment that was a big deal for me even though to others it probably would’ve seemed stupid. We looked at memoirs written by other students in the past and we spoke about what made those memoirs effective. We then discussed using dialogue in our memoirs. After this we started working on our first draft. The next step was exploding a moment. For this part of the writing process we added a lot of extra detail into a specific moment in the memoir. We also wrote three openings that we thought sounded good and then chose one to add to a new draft of our memoir. After this we got feedback from our peers and then revised our memoirs based on the feedback we got. The next thing we did was add verbal irony and sarcasm. I used this as a way to show how dramatic that moment was for me as a little kid. The moment I’d chosen involved me crying because of something that was in reality fairly mundane. As a kid it seemed like a much bigger problem than what it actually was. I used verbal irony to say things that were overly extreme. We also used imagery. The purpose of this was to make our story easy for people to visualize when they were reading it. One thing that we worked on was diction. We used specific wording to improve our memoirs. The last thing we did to finish off our memoirs was work on the ending, so we wrote a few that we liked and then added our favorite one to our memoir. The last thing we did was get feedback and then revise for the final time. After that we turned in our final memoir.

                The artifact I would use is to represent my growth over all would be my first draft. I think that this draft shows where I started because it’s what I wrote before I went through the process. I think that I was an ok writer before doing this project, but I know that I have improved and I think that showing where I started is an important part of understanding how far I’ve come. My second artifact is my exploded moment because it is the culmination of all of this skills we learned over the course of this project. My exploded moment is very descriptive and it is the part of my memoir that I’m most proud of.