Remediated Essay

Process Reflection: Remediated Essay

At first I really wanted to create a video for my remediated project. I think very visually especially when I write, so I thought that it would be the best new form to try. However, when I chose to remediate “The Unspoken Rules of Life”, an essay I wrote contrasting the explicit instructions of a board game with the implicit expectations of our lives, I realized that the form would not fit as well as I had hoped. The Game of Life I played as a child guided me through all off the great parts of life but did not prepare me at all for death or failure, which is something I really wanted to come across in my new essay.

I worried I wouldn’t be able to show all of this through a video, and then an idea hit me! I would make an instruction manual for the real game of life, “The Game of Life and Death”, filled with the complications and sadness that the old game didn’t include. I formatted the essay exactly like the instructional manual from the board game, and the graphics and headings really added to the irony since there is no way to make an instruction manual for life. However, I felt that I got too caught up in adhering to the original instruction manual, and my writing really suffered for it.

I realized that I lost the narrative, and I worried that my audience would not be able to connect as well to the choices that I made and the emotions that went along with them without a story. I decided in my revision to keep with the instruction manual look in the beginning but to break from that in the middle of the essay and go back to more of a narrative. I felt that in the original remediation I was so focused on formatting it like an instruction manual that I fell into very vague simple sentences that didn’t feel honest. I tried to rewrite the essay in the style of Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer.”  Hopefully by breaking away from the instruction manual form,  I will be able to return to the narrative that made the essay so emotionally powerful while still employing the instruction manual frame to provide some juxtaposition and irony.

(Click here to see the Final Revision, Draft, and Original Essay)

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