Twinery is a program that I have my grade 6/7 students use to write Choose Your Own Adventure Stories so I have a bit of familiarity with the program. Just like how I advise my students, I followed the same instructions I gave them before beginning their Twinery project. My strategy going into completing this task was to plan out my story first. From previous experience, these stories tend to fall apart or lose connection when you are writing on the fly without a proper plan. I also made sure to write my entire story out first and dealt with the coding after my story was completed.
What I noticed when writing in this format was that it was far less formal than what I am used to writing normally. Incorporating coding into the writing itself also further moved me away from the writing that I was used to. What I also noticed was that my students were much more engaged with this style of writing compared to when I had them write formally whether on paper or through a computer. I think this is because the style that Twinery is written is closer to the Internet language that they are used to communicating with their peers on over social media. The sentences are written in a style that is more like the utterances with the “new rules” mentioned in The Allusionist podcast (Zaltzman, 2019). However, even though the writing is more informal, Twinery still forces the writer to be technical as there were certain rules that had to be followed or else the page wouldn’t load like how we wanted it to. For example, when I tried to include the audio files, I had to have the file at the end of my document instead of the beginning or else my text would not show up and all you would hear would be the sound effect.
Upon reflection, these are some of the questions I thought of. If there is an agreed upon set of rules and understandings, could this be a new style of writing that will be widely accepted? If the new generation is more accustomed to this style/language, would we phase out the formal writing that we are used to seeing now? Will we see publishers writing books for youth more with this style/language and less like the traditional format? Imagine needing to read Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter in Internet Language. Thinking of all the wizard emojis and the changes in punctuation to show tone is already giving me a headache.
I enjoyed getting to write using the “new rules” and write with a more informal voice. Reading The Temple of No helped me ease up on the formal writing and write in a similar style to what those creators did.
References:
Zaltzman, H. (Producer). (2019, July 13). The Allusionist – Allusionist 102. New Rules. https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/new-rules
Hey Juliano! Funnily enough, we both used ancient civilizations as a theme for our Twine stories! Mine is exploring ancient Egypt and Greece! This must be because we are both upper intermediate teachers so ancient civilizations are in our curriculum?! I like that you went one step further to include sound effects! I found the sound effects really added to the experience of exploring your story. I will definitely learn how to add those next time!
Hi Sarah! Being an upper intermediate teacher was definitely what lead me to choose an ancient civilization for my Twinery story. After reading all of my students’ projects, I felt inspired to follow in their footsteps and write one on that topic as well. Inserting the sound effects wasn’t too difficult as the HTML code is quite similar to the one needed to add images but Finding the sound effects was the difficult part, although we did get provided a link for a location to host sound effects for us.