By April Conway

Natissa’s essay for “Investigations from the Center” was already evocative. However, when she revised this essay for her multimodal composition, the essay was injected with even more life. I found “Super Speller” to be wonderfully playful, experimental, and exploratory. The conceit of trauma as framed by a spelling bee blossoms into a three-part narrative that is mysterious and yet completely satisfactory. Like other sophisticated writers, Natissa does not give her audience easy answers; rather, she lets us sit with the apprehensive sounds and images before us, and allows us to piece together fractured stories from her life and imagine our own grim conclusions.   

I also found that the audio components (voiceover, music, sound effects, and ambient noise) and video components (video, scrolling images, still images) created a wonderfully textured video.   

Because of her proficiency with multimodal literacy and her writerly acumen, I do not exaggerate when I say that Natissa’s “Super Speller” is one of my favorite student compositions.