Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life

With the use of text, single graphics, and comic-strip image series, Dork Diaries employs multimedia storytelling, defined as the use of multiple formats (text, image, video, etc.) to convey a narrative. At the time of publication, books with images were largely written for younger readers, but this type of storytelling has expanded with the graphic novel market. With the advancements in publishing technology, digital stories may be told using a variety of formats, though trends still lean toward text supplemented with images where appropriate or desired.

Multimedia storytelling presents unique challenges in terms of making stories accessible, particularly to audiences with visual challenges. With the invention of ebooks, people who did not have enough usable vision to read print materials gained access to titles at a faster, more accessible rate. For books rendered in text only, little needs to be done beyond digitizing titles in a format accessible to text-to-speech software. In the case of books like Dork Diaries, however, the images make the book partly inaccessible to readers with visual impairments. Dork Diaries contains mainly decorative images (pictures that add to context made clear in the text). Readers who can’t see the images do not need the picture to understand what’s happening, and the captions for such images help fill information gaps. The comic-strip-style image sequences, such as the one found at the end of Chapter 14, however, convey story details not given in text. Readers who cannot see the images must guess their contents based on context clues. Dork Diaries shows the effectiveness of multimedia storytelling but also highlights its pitfalls when all forms of storytelling are not accessible to all readers. The images would need text descriptions to give all readers the full story experience.

Despite the challenges they may present to visually impaired readers, graphic novels like Dork Diaries are widely recognized as beneficial in classroom settings, both for their ability to engage reluctant readers and those with learning challenges and for the unique learning opportunities they present to more advanced readers. For readers who may feel intimidated by the large blocks of text found in traditional novels, a narrative that relies on images may be more accessible and more appealing. For more experienced readers, the work of synthesizing visual and verbal cues to make sense of the narrative offers opportunities to think more deeply about how storytelling works and how meaning is constructed. These lessons help students become better, more informed readers not only of text-based literature but also of television, film, and other forms of media.