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Reflection:

To complete the task, I started with the title. As I could not find emojis to transcribe the exact text in the title, I used multiple emojis that may help readers decode the title. I showed the array of the emojis to my 7-year-old who does not know the exact word(s) in the title, and she was able to describe what each picture may represent and how they would link to each other. Even though she could not come up with the correct word(s) for the title because of a lack of vocabs in her word bank,  she was able to get the “idea” of what I was trying to represent using these emojis. What I experimented with my daughter can be described by Bolter (2001) as he contends that “two readers could explain the same message in different words, and speakers of different languages could share the same system of picture writing. Picture writing is perhaps constructed culturally (even today) as closer to the reader” (p. 59).

Readers may not share the same languages, but they may share similar cultures, then the intended ideas and meanings of picture writing can be successfully delivered across. But then again if the writer’s intention is for readers to decode the picture writing into the exact text and readers have not watched or heard of the show before, then it would be challenging for them to interpret the pictures to the writer’s intended word(s).

In English we read from left to right and from top to bottom and I assumed that my readers would read my emoji story in the same direction as I created the story as I would write it in English text. If it was read by someone whose language uses different script direction, then it would cause confusion and the intended meaning of the story would not be able to be delivered successfully.

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