Looking in the Mirror: Reflecting on Our Writing of an Autoethnography of a Biracial Adolescent

In Writing 111, we as freshmen have been introduced to a plethora of types of writing. From research papers to freewriting to literature responses, we have been exposed to new ways of expressing ourselves, and proving our intelligence on paper. Our final project involved making an auto-ethnography in video form, based on Hannah Goodwin’s Project 3 paper about her experiences as a biracial youth in America. In order to translate Hannah’s autoethnography into not only a popular source but also a video, we had to first transform her nine page paper into a condensed script, without losing vital evidence. Since a video involves more than just a script, we also had to decide not only what rhetorical devices best suited our popular audience, but also how to translate them into video while simultaneously working effectively and productively as a group.

Group Work

There is a distinct difference between working together as a group, and working productively as a group. At times, we were not productive, and that certainly affected the amount of time it took us to complete the project and produce a finished, polished product. However, it was in these unproductive times that we became closer and more comfortable as a group on a mission. At one point while taking one of our many breaks, we sat in Subway and realized that we really are not such a different group of people. We like all types of music, we enjoy hanging out with our friends and telling stories, and we all feel like our first semester at Wake Forest has been a success. Had it not been for these unproductive times, we probably would not have felt comfortable expressing our opinions or forcing Alex to play “Girl On Fire” by Alicia Keys at the end of the video. Our video turned out the way it did because we were open with communication, we each contributed to the group effort, and we all shared the desire to succeed.

We bonded well as a group, but that does not change the fact that we are four very different students, each with our own sets of strengths and weaknesses. So, we decided to play those strengths off of each other and use them to make our project a success. For example, Alex proved to be a magician in regards to video editing and production. He had the best software, and the most knowledge, so he was titled “tech wizard.” Since we decided to use Hannah’s autoethnography, she became the star actress, and did fabulously. She also contributed her personal information and stories in order to make a visual transition from paper to screen. Phin contributed his excellent writing skills by transforming Hannah’s paper into a script for her to read as a voiceover. Ella was able to do a lot of the filming and also bring together concepts and ideas for scenes that were not explicitly described in the script. Had we not all contributed to this project, and had we not worked together effectively the statement can be made that our project would have been a complete failure.

Rhetorical Choices and Challenges

In order to understand exactly what choices we wanted to make in regards to visual and audio elements in the video, we all read Hannah’s auto-ethnography and noted what she had used in her paper in order to get her idea across in a scholarly fashion. Neither color nor audio were used in the paper, but getting a feel for the mood that the paper set allowed us to choose a video which attempted to set a similar mood and guide our audience in feeling certain emotions. We had several tools available to us in order to affect the audience. Within the visual realm we had color, video, and still images; within the audio realm we had many variables to alter like the tone of the narration, word choice, empty space between ideas, and the audio from recorded video.

There were tons of choices to make when it came to the visual representation of Hannah’s paper and many challenges were overcome. We wanted the guiding narrative of our video to be a day in Hannah’s life here at Wake Forest. We wanted to have Hannah’s hair down for the video for numerous reasons, but this meant requiring her to have her hair down every time we filmed, which meant planning exactly when we would film. Though this did not require too much harder work on our end, it definitely was not a logistic we had anticipated coming up. The harsh power of Vertical Screen Syndrome affected us early in the project, and meant re-filming Hannah doing her hair. Other visual choices were made of course, like choosing to have certain colors accented throughout the video while maintaining black and white as the background.

One example of our ability to make a rhetorical choice in terms of audio is the tone of voice Hannah recorded her narration in. The script was a very good transcription of the academic language Hannah used in her article into casual words she would say on any given day. If Hannah was annoyed in a certain section of her paper, she read that section in an annoyed tone. The transcription made it easier for Hannah to record and add the real emotion the words made her feel. The same annoyance she got across in her paper in several sentences was successfully heard in the video within a few seconds.

Script Writing and Transcription of Important Details

In order to turn Hannah’s nine page autoethnography into a script we had to both condense it into just the most vital parts, while also switching the language to fit our popular audience. The first step in doing so was reading through her auto-ethnography multiple times in order to understand her argument thoroughly and thus be able to distinguish her main points. After this we went through her auto-ethnography and circled the parts we felt were both the most powerful and also the necessary to her argument. For instance, when attempting to begin writing the introduction of the script we circled important background facts, such as the fact that her hometown, San Diego, is a majority White and Latino as this fact is important to her unique experience. As we moved further into the script, the more important pieces became her personal experiences and her reflections on these. One issue that we faced while condensing was maintaining organization and clarity. It was important for us to realize that our script was a separate piece of writing from her paper. Recognizing this allowed us to differ the organization of our script versus that of her essay, because even though we cut some parts, those parts still played an important role in her paper and its organization. Basically, while we picked parts from her paper and put them in our script, the script would have had no organization if it were just a collection of bits and pieces from her essay. Instead these bits and pieces served as the skeleton for our script, which we then filled in in order to complete the story.

In order to form this skeleton we also had to change both the language and scholarly sources from an academic context to fit our popular audience. Hannah’s autoethnography was written in response to scholarly research on her in-group, which means it read as very formal. Had we used this same formal structure in our narration, it would have made for a very boring video. To fix this, we took the circled areas and then rewrote them in our words using an informal tone. Most of these tone changes, such as adding contractions, using slang, and replacing complex words with more common synonyms, turned our script into a more personable piece of writing that read like a conversation. One of the most challenging parts of this was fitting her scholarly sources into our script without reverting to an academic tone. Essentially, we ended up using short direct quotes that were easy to follow, and even had the quote in text on the screen to emphasize it. What became difficult was choosing which quotes, and what part of each quote, would support Hannah’s argument while also connecting to other quotes. Luckily, Hannah did a good job synthesizing her sources in her original paper, so we found that most of the areas we circled had a combination of both her voice and the scholarly sources. Since she had already connected her opinions to the scholarly sources we kept the two together when writing the script. Basically, any scholarly source related to an area we circled, was transferred into the script alongside the circled area.

Rhetorical Features of Constructing the Video

When we started working on the video we hit a few bumps in the process. We at first could not decide which autoethnography to use within the group because we felt each of them had a unique perspective to them that would easily fit a video description. We ended up with a final decision of Hannah’s autoethnography, and immediately started throwing out ideas for what we thought the video should look like. We felt that since her autoethnography was from the perspective of a biracial adolescent, we should have the theme in black and white. Alongside that, we would incorporate some colored portions with Hannah and other characters colored, but the rest of the scene would be in black and white. But as we started to edit the video, we had a few struggles matching up the audio with the scenes that wouldn’t necessarily need a connection between the audio and video being filmed. We improvised by incorporating pictures of relatives and scholarly authors, with cut scenes animating text across the screen.

We felt the need to integrate two main rhetorical features, pathos and ethos. The pathos was to be subsumed via the black and white theme, especially starting out with the text animation of a half of a phrase in white, then revealing the rest to spell “IM BIRACIAL.” Each of the scenes depicted her in a normal setting but revealing the typical happenings of a biracial child. It displayed frequent misperceptions and awkward stereotypes that could connect to a common audience. The ethos feature was to be revealed via the pictures of the scholarly authors and text animations of quotes taken from each of the articles. It allowed the information being told to have a visual display, keeping the legitimacy of the video in tact.

Conclusion

Overall, this project pushed us out of our comfort zones as we had to not only work in a group for the first time in college, but also had to do so using a media that is relatively unfamiliar to us, except for Alex. Fortunately, we found that we had already begun doing both of these in Writing 111 and were more prepared than we thought. The fact that we had all previously worked with each other in class, and had examined multiple video sources for rhetorical devices in class, gave us the seeds for this project. Not to mention this project has also given us new tools for the future. Next time we have to work with a group, we have learned that setting hard individual deadlines is the best way to ensure the group is proactive. We are proud that our video represents how the world, and specifically our nation, is moving forward. While the video focuses most of its attention on the downfalls or struggles of being born biracial in the United States, it also marks some of the progress society has made in as short a time as Hannah’s life. We hope that this video is shared and the story can go on to impact the lives of Americans everywhere by impacting not only being accepting of biracial children, but also helping biracial children accept themselves.

Ella Allman, Alex Demos, Phin Emery, and Hannah Goodwin