Personal Literacy Narrative

Essay 1: Literacy Narrative

Due Date: Sunday, July 19, 2019

Length: 1000 words (include a word count at end of essay)

Assignment: (Please scroll down to read) In the literacy narrative, your goal is to reflect on the role that reading and writing have played in your life. In other words, you will write a story about yourself as a literate person. At one time, you could neither read nor write, and now, many years later, you are taking a composition class at a university. So, how did you get here? What people, events and literature shaped you as a writer? What does writing (or books, or language) mean to you?

Explore the part of your identity that is immersed in the language through the first-person narrative. Your essay will include the elements of narrative, including characters, plot, setting, and theme, as well as vivid details and dialogue.

Examine your experiences and pick out several memories that helped to shape the kind of reader and writer you are today. Consider both the negative and the positive experiences you’ve had with literacy. This means you will expose conflict and tension. Embarrassing moments can be just as interesting to your audience as academic triumphs. Consider your audience in choosing the experiences and details you share. For this assignment, your audience is high school students who are considering whether to go to college or go to work. Objectives:

To use narrative for a specific purpose (e.g. argue a point, provide an example, communicate an emotion)

To tell a clear, cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end

To practice rhetorical sensitivity, bearing in mind your tone, audience, and purpose

– To connect positive and negative events from the past to your current feelings about reading and writing

To practice a writing process, including invention, drafting, and revision

Suggested Techniques: Tell a story by depicting connected events over time Include tension or conflict

Use concrete details to evoke image and emotion

Use figurative language to help the reader share your experience

Show—through resolution, recognition, or retrospective interpretation—what the events mean to you

Convey an appealing voice appropriate to your subject matter