The narrative strategies I used in my profile were very different than the ones in my memoir. In the memoir, I told my own story from my perspective. I chose what details to include and not to include, because I was there and knew what happened. This was very different in contrast to my profile, where I was telling the stories of other people from my perspective. I don’t know what happened, so I have to speculate on what happened. Choice usage of mild exaggeration for effect is not easily done in the profile. The different context of the profile, of having to represent the broad group of who I surveyed was also difficult. I used narrative as a tool to create a connection to the numbers and data.
The research process shaped the project by forcing me out of the comfortable genre of essay into videos. To be able to represent the group that I had surveyed, it wouldn’t just be enough to have a large amount of words, and incorporating images into textual media effectively is hard. I thought that with the large sample of quotes, numbers, graphs, etc. that it would be better represented through a more visual medium like video. It also guided the project in how I approached telling their stories. I had to piece together their experiences through the small text based answers they gave out.
The most significant choice that I made during this project was the decision to write a survey. As stated in the previous paragraphs, I found myself being gently pushed towards certain decisions as a result of creating such a survey. It brought the video, it brought the slideshow.
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