I am linking my Task 6 ‘Emoji Story’ to Stephanie Carr’s. When I first came across Stephanie Carr’s post and a few others like it I was in the middle of watching Squid Game so I did not read it at first as I was trying to avoid spoilers. I came back to it after I had finished the show because I liked the visual layout of her wordpress page.

Of the Task 6 ‘Emoji Story’ posts I read Stephanie’s experience seemed closer to mine than anyone else’s. It is clear that Stephanie enjoyed the activity and had fun doing it. Significantly, the story Stephanie is trying to represent with her emojis is an action heavy plot in contrast to the story I tried to represent which focuses on the characters relationships with each other. She manages to pack a lot of plot and exposition into a very small number of emojis. Similarly to me she focussed on representing ideas and identifying characters, rather than trying to work with proper grammar and articulate individual words. There is a sparse efficiency in how Stephanie has chosen to represent the plot of the first episode of the show. She lists in chronological order the significant plot points from the first episode and having seen the episode I am able to follow it clearly. Although I think I would struggle to piece together the story if I was not already familiar with the episode. Readers are expected to guess what the relationship is between one face and another. We might assume that we are moving from scene to scene as we scroll down through the list of emojis, but there aren’t many clues as to how much time has passed. I don’t know how someone would make sense of the numbers used without having seen the show. There are also very few clues about how the characters in this story feel about anything. However, having read Stephanie’s reflection I realise that some of this is by design, that she is leaving space for the reader’s own creativity to fill in some of the blanks. I like that approach as I usually prefer stories that leave room for the receiver to do some figuring out and interpreting on their own.

Referencing Bolter, Stephanie talks about the ‘linearity of reading’. (2001, p.54) This did make me reflect on how much we rely on the formats that are familiar to us from written text story telling even when telling stories without text. All of the Emoji stories I read relied on sentence like structures and paragraphs of sorts, which assume that the reader is familiar with text based writing. Both Stephanie and I spoke about how we did not focus on punctuation and other forms of grammar. Reflecting on it now I can see that even when we think we are neglecting grammar it still shapes how we tell our stories whether we are using text or not.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Chapter 4. Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print(2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110