Following Jay-Z's Footsteps

Although my topic for my IP Multimodal Memoir Essay still does not resonate with me perfectly, I have decided to stick with my biracial background as the foundation for my topic. The past two weeks have served a great purpose in terms of helping me get my memoir started, but nothing has gotten me farther than the "IP Writing Practice: Description" assignment. Reading Jay-Z's story of discovering the cypher, as well as creating my own story that sends a message helped me get started with my memoir.

Here are my three answers to the questions posed in task 2 of the assignment.

This is my best attempt at sending a message through a story, without directly stating the message, and while imitating Jay-Z's style of writing. The message I was sending was a story of an obese child, and the activity taking place was the child running a mile.

First off, I would just like to say how much I enjoyed reading about Jay-Z's cypher story. I have never considered myself a fan of literature, so when a text keeps me actually wanting to read more, that signifies just how much the story resonates with me, and how much I enjoyed reading it. It reminded me of all the stories my dad has told about when he was a kid, and how having "the best rhymes on the block" was a big part of his culture.

From this assignment, I really took away the extent to which my writing needs to be visible. In other words, when I am trying to draw a scene with my words, I must be so descriptive that the reader can picture everything happening. With Jay-Z's writing, I was able to picture literally everything that was going on in the cypher just from the way he described the scene. With this, I tried my best to imitate Jay Z's style with the story of the kid running the mile. I have underlined a few sentences which I believe I did the best I could to describe what the child was feeling while running the mile.

Without reading Jay-Z's work, I would not have been able to see the extent to which adjectives and adverbs could be useful in descriptive writing. Hence, I was able to paint the picture I was trying to draw better than if I hadn't read Jay-Z's story. I now know how far the usage of descriptive writing through adjectives and adverbs can go, and because of this I feel even better about writing my memoir.

Mastering my descriptive writing will go a long way towards enhancing my academic ethos because I will be able to appeal to the reader's imagination, then my story will become more real in their minds.

Here is a picture of Jay-Z sitting alongside Beyoncé.