Road Trip to California
I’m going to be telling a story about a road trip that my boyfriend and I took my boyfriend’s name is Dave and we took a trip to California two years ago we spent 14 days on the road and this is the story of how it started so we live in Winnipeg Manitoba we packed up our SUV with all of the gear that we’d need to take a road trip down to California and back we spent the trip camping 95% of the time I would say so we have our tent or cooler are sleeping gear now we need to Camp so I am someone who’s very prepared and fortunately my boyfriend likes just do things very spur-of-the-moment make things work together by Jacqueline causes some frustration which we learn to workout while we’re on this trip we left around midnight session we are time to leave at the beginning of roach for my opinion. What’s the border of the American Border about 2 a.m. We drove through a few States taking turns going back in a fall day it was amazing to stop off there so we travelled around Yellowstone National Park looking at the Salt Springs we saw some Buffalo before we had our first camp set up our tent is attached to the back I see you be so we sat at 10 to talk to her SUV and we take out everything from the SUV and we sleep inside the car with my older gear there so we’ve spent our first night there and second day weeks for the rest of Yellowstone National Park looking at the hot springs and the geysers there which are absolutely incredible I definitely suggest taking a look at the beautiful colours of the hot springs and the height in which the geysers go up into the sky is unbelievable after we’re finished going on Yellowstone we continued our road trip towards California so we drove through Wyoming and Nevada tell early the next day we arrived in California where we went to Yosemite National Park has two kids that live in the Prairies is quite amazing. The mountains and driving through the mountains of Yosemite to travel around Yosemite National Park for the day we headed out of the park until he found somewhere to camp. Dinah’s we decide we were just going to start driving we find somewhere to sleep at a campground somewhere so we didn’t plan ahead in terms of our Campground bookings to find somewhere just outside of Yosemite National Park Suite packed up in the night and next day was my favourite day we visited Sequoia National Park the whole purpose of this trip was to see the sequoia trees as I am absolutely in love with these trees so there we saw at General and General Grant General Sherman is the largest river by volume in the world and General Grant is a third largest tree in the world to exploit Sequoia National absolute dream come true for me after we are finished out in the woods we travel to Santa Monica to see the ocean which way is my boyfriend Dave’s favourite part was seeing at the ocean exploring the Santa Monica Pier going around on the scooters that they have which was super fun and checking out the beaches there and we started making our way at the house so heading up to Northern California going through Colorado not Colorado. Org i’m Oregon and then into Washington we are heading up to Vancouver where my boyfriend is originally from and he has some family there so we drove from California all the way up to California where we spent a few days visiting with his family in California Rosary in Vancouver once we’re finished in Vancouver we made the 24 hours back to Manitoba so we like to drive long stretches in quick about the time so we take turns going at back and forth driving through the night until we made it back to Winnipeg Manitoba and back to central Canada manitoba I hope you enjoyed my story
Reflection
You know how some people don’t like to hear themselves talk…I kind of felt that way when I read myself speaking. It was a bizarre experience as I don’t often use a voice-to-text app, especially for 5 minutes at a time. Overall, I enjoyed testing out speachnotes and exploring the text after sharing my story.
How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
The first thing I noticed about this oral story transcription is the lack of punctuation. The text does not include periods, commas, apostrophes, or exclamation marks. The lack of punctuation makes it very difficult to read as the entire text has only one start and one end. At one point there was a period that was added in the middle of my “sentence”, I am not sure how it got there, it must have thought I said “period” which I did not intentionally say. Secondly, the lack of grammar in this text makes it difficult to effectively communicate the thoughts and message. What stood out to me was the singular vs. plural forms of nouns that were mistaken. Although the noun was the same, the context of the text was confusing as it changed endings. This text lacked capitalization for the most part as there was no periods to break up sentences. The only capitalization that was used was for some places, but not all.
What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?
This text makes me laugh trying to remember what I was even saying in my story to figure out what is “wrong” with it. When reading I can tell that it isn’t right because it does not make sense at some parts, however for the most part I think it got a lot right. The main issues with the text me some words were replaced. At one point I wanted the word “which” but instead it says “Jacqueline”. Other times it split up one word into two, such as when I wanted it to say “weird” but instead it says “we are”. Many times, a word would be replaced that sounded very similar, for example “exploit” instead of “explore”. These small changes do make a big difference in the story, especially when it comes to exploring Yosemite National Park and exploiting it.
I was surprised to see that this text got many of the locations correct and included capitalization for the most part, other than “manitoba” at the end. I think the text got the main idea right, overall the main idea of this story is the road trip my boyfriend and I took to California from Winnipeg and the places we visited along the way. I would say a rough estimate of 80% of the words are correct which allows for the main ideas and thoughts to be expressed some-what effectively.
What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
The most common mistake in this text is replacing words that sound similar but were not intended. Another common mistake was replacing words that were not similar at all. For example, at one point I was trying to describe visiting Sequoia National Park to see the trees and the text says “General Grant is the largest river by volume” instead of “tree.” This one-word replacement changes the story completely and is confusing to the reader. Now, it is completely possible that I just accidentally said river instead of tree, however we will never know because that is one of the downsides of oral storytelling, there is no record to know what was said.
“General Sherman is the largest river by volume in the world and General Grant is a third largest tree in the world”
What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
If this story had been scripted, I believe the reader would have been able to get a clearer more efficient message. Reading this text makes me feel like my thoughts were a little all over the place and were not as linear as they could have been. I was focused on sharing a story that took 5 minutes. In the beginning I felt like I was including more detail, but as time went on began to share the story more quickly as time moved quicker than I had anticipated. A script would have resulted in a shorter message that included the key points that a reader would need to make to get the main message across. Without a script I found myself adding ideas that may not be relevant, such as the personality of myself compared to my boyfriend. This did not come up in my story as I thought it would throughout so the message at the beginning was not necessary.
In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
My oral story was made visible with this speech-to-text website that allowed me to visualize how my story was told. I noticed that my oral story was not as precise as a written version of this story would have been. In my oral story I tended to include details that were not relevant to the story or were confusing for the “listener”. Written story telling allows the writer to carefully craft the message that they would like to share and ensure accuracy (Gnanadesikan, 2011). The beauty of oral storytelling is that the story may be different each time and therefore unique as the message will be different than when it is first said and will rely on the memory of the storyteller to keep accuracy. With oral storytelling, if someone does not know the story, then they cannot hear it. For example, if someone wanted to hear a story, and they asked everyone they knew to share the story, but no one did, then the story would not be heard. Whereas with written storytelling, the story could be searched in a book, or now online (Aboud, 2014). My oral story did not reach a large audience, in fact, no one heard my story, therefore no one would be able to share if. If I did share it with an audience, it would take longer to travel and reach a smaller audience. My oral story is now written and posted online for a larger audience to “hear” (Gnanadesikan, 2011).
References
Aboud, Abe. (2014, September 8). Walter Ong – oral cultures and early writing [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/uvF30zFImuo
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internetLinks to an external site. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).