Name: Ana Saldana Grade: 9/10

Ana,
I really enjoyed reading your comic! Thank you for sharing your favorite comic authors and talking about
the website – I’m thinking of using it in my next class.
With regard to your analytical essay, it is well-organized and easy to follow. Here are some areas that you
might need to work on if you decide to revise your work:
1. Conclusion
2. Clarity and concision (sentences)
3. Use another class reading that was helpful in your genre translation
4. Fixing minor grammatical mistakes

Criteria Needs more work Strong

Opening: the paper is introduced appropriately for the assignment
so that the reader is clear about the writer’s intention.

Appropriate context is provided.

The writer has encouraged a reader’s interest.

The thesis is clear and appropriate for the assignment.

Readability—organization, clarity, cohesion, and flow: the

ideas are organized and structured in a manner appropriate for
the assignment

The student shows skill and knowledge of transitions and bridge

building to help the reader follow the flow of ideas.

Paragraphs are unified around one idea and one point.

Sentences are constructed and arranged effectively to show

variety, clarity, and concision.

Word choice is precise, clear, effective, appropriate, and

interesting.
Development: the ideas and points are clearly and appropriately
developed with sufficient details so as to show depth of thought
and ability to link generalizations and main points with specific
support.

Development goes beyond restating others’ words and work and

includes the writer’s own analysis and explanation/reasoning.

Outside sources are accurately and honestly introduced,

quoted, paraphrased, summarized, integrated, and
documented.
Closing: the piece of writing is concluded in a way that is
appropriate for the purpose and audience (closing statement)
 The conclusion provides coherence with the intention noted in
the introduction and the support provided in the development of
the piece of writing.

Writing conventions—compassion and consideration for the

reader: shows care in revising, editing, and proofreading so as to
eliminate most problems with standard English usage, syntax,
punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Although the reader might
encounter an occasional error, there should be no pattern of errors;
shows precise and consistent adherence to documentation
conventions when outside sources are used.

Ana Saldana Santana

Writing 2

Professor Federova

07 March 2019

The Translation of a Manual into a Comic

The translation of a writing genre into a different writing genre complicates is challenging

when the conventions of both writings are not examined. In my translation of genres, I chose to

translate a manual. In general, manuals come with a product that you purchase. Usually, manuals Commented [MOU1]: What product? It is usually an
electronic device, right?
include step-by-step instructions on how to use that new product, and they include warnings on

how it should not be used. I selected this writing genre, and I translated it into a comic. Throughout Commented [MOU2]: Why?

my translation, I considered the conventions of writing manuals and writing comics, my audience,

and my purpose. Commented [MOU3]: Good!

I started my genre translation by selecting my writing and examining its conventions. I Commented [MOU4]: It’s a bit unclear what you mean
here.
chose the manual for a Samsung Galaxy S9 / S9 + as my writing genre. At the beginning of my Commented [MOU5]: Should this sentence be a part of
your introduction?
analyzation, an obvious choice I noticed was the writer separated the text into at least two columns

per page, which is a common convention in the formats of other manuals. In addition, the manual
divides is divided into different organized sections with a title page at the beginning of each

section. For example, there is a section titled Phone. Therefore, the title page is the bold word

Phone along with an image of the calling log layout. The writer includes more subtitles in between

each section to differentiate the instructions by category. For example, there are subtitles such as

"Make a Call from Recent", "Delete a call", "Block a Number", among other similar subtitles.

Below each subtitle, there is a sentence describing the action you can do with your phone along

with a numbered list of step-by-step instructions on how to do it. To make the instructions easier

to follow, the writer includes icons to show what you need to tap to perform the instructed action.

All these conventions make up the manual of a Samsung Galaxy S9 / S9 + phone.

With all these conventions, I concluded the purpose of this genre is as simple as giving

instructions about a new item that is purchased. Consequently, the audience for this genre is broad Commented [MOU6]: This topic sentence needs a bit more
work. How does it correlate with the content of this
paragraph?
enough to allow me to change it to several genres. Initially, I wanted to translate it into a letter, but

I resisted to that idea because I had written so many letters as of now. Therefore, I created a short

comic portraying the main idea of the manual. There were different types of comics to choose

from, but I decided to go with a more modern approach with a social media comic. Social media Commented [MOU7]: Great choice!

comics are for people who use social media such as Instagram, Tumblr, or Facebook, and they

want to see a comic occasionally. These comics are relatable, and even funny sometimes. There

are many people, including myself, who follow comic accounts on Instagram where the creators

post a comic strip as an Instagram post every day or depending on their designated

schedule. Hence, I decided my audience would be those people who follow Instagram comic

accounts for an entertaining comic read.

In order to translate the manual into a comic, I began by createding a character for my

comic. Initially, I chose to portray an old man who just bought a new phone, and I named him
Billy. However, since social media comics need to be relatable, and since Instagram is used by a

younger audience, I changed my character to a young lady named Julie. In the comic, Julie uses

her phone portraying some of the features that the Samsung Galaxy Manual mentions. To create

this character, and comic, I used the website Pixton where you can create comics for fun or

educational purposes. This website allows you to choose any character and customize their eyes,

arms, hair, and other characteristics to create your desired character. While creating Julie, I

understood how comics creators follow through this same process.

For instance, comic creators create new characters, and they decide what he/she will look

like. They make a choice between their characteristics like choosing between brown hair or black

hair, tall or short, glasses or not glasses. Besides choosing a character, comic creators think about

the background. I chose a background based on what Julie was doing on the scene. However,

sometimes it is necessary to include details on the background to grab the attention of the reader.

Other times a simple background can get the story going without losing the audience. It was

difficult to think about all these characteristics of a comic. But, just knowing what you want to

create, and thinking about the audience’s reaction helps with the process.

While translating the manual to a comic, besides creating a character, I had to analyze other

different conventions used in comics. According to Scott McCloud in "Writing with Pictures",

there are five choices to consider. For instance, McCloud mentions the choice of moment, frame,

image, word, and flow. Essentially, these choices played a major part in the process of my

translation. The choice of word and its placement was an important convention. While creating

my comic, I noticed that text and its placement needs a lot of thinking. For example, if the text

bubble is placed on the wrong space, it ends up covering the drawing. If the text font is large, it

ends up taking a lot of space, and it looks weird. If it is too small, you cannot read it. Therefore, I
had to think about how much space I wanted to take, or if the sentence was necessary. Coming up

with a sentence was difficult for me too, I thought some sentences were awkward as if not meant

for the character, therefore, I had to change some of those sentences to create a more developed

character and overall flow.

As for the flow, there are many ways to organize a comic and its text. There are many

speech bubbles that you can choose to organize the dialogue. The comic speed bubbles have the

intention to show the characters’ emotions. For example, there are bubbles to express the

character's thoughts or show when the character is screaming or feeling scared. Knowing the

purpose of each convention helps the creator of comics create an accurate representation of what

they want to represent. Furthermore, since I chose to translate the manual into a social media

comic, I had to think about the choice of flow differently. Instagram comics tend to be about four

scenes or short since they need to fit in Instagram's picture layout. As social media comics, each

comic post does not have to relate to the previous one. Which means that my comic does not

necessarily relate to each other to form a long story, but there is a relationship between the

character. As a reference for some Instagram comics, here are some of my favorite comic creators

that inspired me to create mine (@theawkwardyeti, @sarahandersencomics, @adamtots).

Eventually, when creating this comic, my audience became as important as the

conventions. Having a clear idea of who my audience helped me to make better decisions. I even

made some important changes once I realized that I was going off track. It was very important to

consider who my audience was as some decisions were difficult to make. But nevertheless, the

translation process was fun to do. [Add more to your conclusion. Why is it significant to talk about

genre translations? What do they accomplish? Why are they important?]

 Works Cited

McCloud, Scott. Writing with Pictures. New York: Hamper, 2006.