Timothy Machasio

Prof. Erin Dietel-McLaughlin

Multimedia Writing & Rhetoric
Wednesday 21st January 2015
I am Never Drinking Again-Reflection
I have had to present my character to people through objects countless times before.
Just to mention a few times at a new high school right after I enrolled, during interviews to
join a collegiate institution within which I sat for my Cambridge Advanced-Level
examinations and most recently last year during the interview process for the HesburghYusko Scholars Program at this very university.
To be honest, I felt rather frustrated when we were directed to bring personal
artifacts to class through which we would represent ourselves. I thought of my pen, my diary,
my phone, my bracelet, my watch and everything I had previously used to introduce myself.
I felt as if I would be cheating if I referred to objects I already had in the past. I did not have
to think much about which object to bring to class, for the day after our first class I met a
friend of a friend and in the course of the ceremonial small talk she asked me how the scar on
my face came to existence. Right there and then, I noticed that that is a question I had
answered pretty much every time I met a new person. There was my answer. The scar, an
object that I will carry with me for the rest of my life (unless I go in for plastic surgery, which
I wont I have heard stories), would serve as the artifact in question.
I consider myself a pretty fast thinker and writer, and was able to put together the
entire first draft of my narrative in a little less than an hour. As a general practice I recently
decided to adopt, I slept over my first draft and reviewed it the next day. By doing so, I was
able to look at my essay from an entirely new perspective and identify errors in structure and

flow I may not have been able to point out initially due to fatigue. I made a few edits, and
shared my draft with two friends one at Notre Dame and the other one at Yale both who
I know to be very strong writers. Their feedback enabled me to adjust the structure of my
essay accordingly.
I proceeded to time my recitation. At first it was way over the allocated limit my
recording was ten minutes long. I varied my narration tempo, but the best I could come up
with was eight minutes. I dedicated an hour each day for a week to cut out unimportant
details of the story. After I could cut no more without destabilizing the integrity of my
narrative, I timed my vocal narration again. This time it came to around seven minutes. I
removed the smooth transitions linking parts of my story and replaced them with abrupt but
well-cued shifts in place and time something friends I consulted (by uploading the
recording to my SoundCloud account then requesting for their feedback) told me they
found rather stylistic. I cut down my total time to five and half minutes, and really could not
scrape any more detail without adversely affecting the theme and flow of my narrative.
The story of how I got a scar on my face is not one I am proud of, and as a result is
not one I have truthfully told in the past. I have conjured up all manners of anecdotes
ranging from being attacked by rogues in the dead of the night to accidentally falling on an
upright nail to cover up the fact that the scar was inflicted on me during a drunken brawl
at my middle school graduation party. I shared the true story of my scar in my narrative, in
the hope that my vulnerability would not only lend a tone of authenticity to my story but
also signify my genuine investment, dedication and interest in the Multimedia Writing and
Rhetoric course.