ENGL 1101 Literacy Narrative Assignment

A narrative essay tells a story, and a literacy narrative tells a story related to your experience with language, with reading and writing, with learning literacy. The purpose of a literacy narrative is to look at a time in your life when reading and/or writing had a significant effect on you and then to analyze this effect and reflect on it. Following are possible topics:

• An early memory about writing or reading that you recall vividly
• Someone who taught you to read or write
• A book or other text that has been significant for you
• An event at school that was interesting, humorous, or embarrassing, which related to reading or writing or language
• A writing or reading task that you found (or still find) especially difficult or challenging
• A memento that represents an important moment in your literacy development
• The origins of your current attitudes about writing or reading
• Learning to write instant messages, learning to write email appropriately, learning to construct a website, creating and maintaining a Facebook page, or other electronic medium of literacy
• Reading to someone else or watching someone learn to read (or teaching someone to read)
• How you use different “codes” with different audiences
• A conflict you experienced in which language was a big part of the problem
• Your experience in keeping a diary or journal

Remember that a good memoir is focused on usually a relatively brief period of time. It focuses on a single event or 2-3 that are very closely related. Make sure you draw the reader into the essay by using description, narration, dialogue, etc. Remember to reflect on the event and its significance in your life (insight). How did it affect you and does it still affect you?

Specifications

The essay must go onto the fourth page. Make sure you go through all the required drafts, at minimum, and that you turn in all of your work relating to the essay. I do not accept final drafts by themselves, unaccompanied by all the drafts leading up to them. For paper format, use MLA headings and page numbers (see either textbook). Make sure the essay has a title, intro that gets the reader’s attention, as many body paragraphs as the essay needs, conclusion. If you want to try a more creative format, I’m open to that as long as you talk with about it first.

Turn the essay packet in with all of the work held together with a binder clip in backwards chronological order: Letter to the Reader on top, final draft, peer workshop drafts, other drafts, planning. The Paper Packet is due at the beginning of class on the due date.