Journal #4 Response: "Stories That Speak To Us: Multimodal Literacy Narratives"

In this article, Cynthia Selfe explores personal narrative by examining how digital narratives developed in educational settings express identity, knowledge, or meaning. While literary studies have always valued the context/background in which narratives are written, this approach is a shift from other, traditional literary studies which focus on style, structure, and analysis to a focus on how stories are tied to culture, identity, and meaning.

Digital Narratives accomplishes several things for the author:

• assist individuals with identity formation and self-understanding through what they choose to tell or represent. 
• identify a beginning point of an experience (why the author is who he is or the beginning point of how he became so) and a goal or end point
• give the author a place to express who or what they identify with, creating the author and author's experience as a reference point for user. Selfe identifies relational positioning as a "rhetorical agency." 

Digital narratives also accomplish several things for the reader:

• Gives the reader an opportunity to see things from the author's perspective.
• Helps the reader to understand, respect, and gain insights into an issue or person.
• They "speak." Readers learn from the author's experience and can compare it with their own. 
• View the author as an individual with unique and valuable experience and skill sets that we can learn from. 

For example, this narrative about Selfe coming to get to know students through digital narratives helped me to better understand the value of the digital narrative as a method for understanding people. One thing that I have found very helpful as I write for various audiences is to research the stories that my audience has published: for example, I might read what my professors have published, or I might review the kinds of stories that companies that I plan to work for have published or their "about us" narratives to better understand how they frame themselves and what their values are. 

My biggest take-away from this article was this quote:

Thus, story tellers situate themselves—both in positive and resistant ways—to parents and other family members who them help establish personal literacy values; to sponsors...who provide entrés and support for particular literate activities; to teachers who might punish, reward, or control their practices as readers and writers; and to peers who might share or resist a storyteller’s personal literacy values.

Telling your story in a way that represents how you want to represent yourself to your audience and not just what your audience expects --especially digitally-- is risky. When have you put yourself out there to tell your story?

Digital storytelling is not just beneficial for personal growth. Learning how to effectively tell a story digitally is key to marketing not just yourself, but a brand or product in the business world. Adam Weinroth, Chief Marketing Officer of OneSpot, developed the following infographic to guide users in telling a brand's story:

When has someone persuaded you or changed your mind about something through storytelling?