Shivani's SAS Blog

The top 3 insights I got from the last day of workshops were about the title, reflection and organization. Both the narratives we analyzed didn't have great titles, one didn't even have a title at all. Through the discussion, we realized how important having a good title was, because it would set up a little bit of context for the reader, it also shouldn't give the entire thing away. Next, while analyzing the narratives, we found that often the reflection was too blunt. Andrew, who did the animal encounter narrative, had to have a lot of reflection at the end based on the mentor text. However, quite a bit of it was too blunt, and this is a lot like my reflection too. I need to make my reflection fit with my narrative in a more subtle way, and have the reader infer some of it rather than downright telling them what I learned. Lastly, organization. In some narrative we read, the beginning wasn't really connected to the middle (crux) of the story, or the focus wasn't

The top 3 insights I got from workshop today was on characterization, redundancy, and the conclusion. While analyzing Maddie's narrative, she chose to characterize her friend more than her, so in the end, we knew more about her friend than her. It was important to follow the mentor to an extent, but she also needed to add details about herself to help the reader understand who the narrator is. Redundancy is something that could add emphasis to a narrative, but too much slows the reader down and doesn't create an efficiently paced narrative. In Da In's narrative, she told us she had chicken pox quite a few times on the first page, however we already knew this from the title, so it was unnecessary to add these many details. Lastly, it's important to end your narrative well enough so the reader doesn't have many lingering questions. Back to Maddie's narrative, I had many questions when I read her narrative, mainly because it ended so abruptly and didn't provide