rough draft of my literacy narrative

Literacy Narrative

                When I was first learning to read, probably around the age of 4 or 5, my sister would often let me read to her. Nikki, my older sister, being about 7 years older than me and an intimidating person in my eyes (she wasn’t the nicest when we were growing up…) often made me feel uncomfortable when I would read aloud in her presence. “You’re saying that wrong!” or “That’s not how you pronounce that word!” were often things I would hear her say, or scream, at me when I was trying to put together all of these different letters and vowels and consonants and such into structure such as words and sentences (although I was usually reading Doctor Seuss so the sentences weren’t too awful complex). When I did pronounce a word or phrase wrong, and it happened often, she would let me know. When that would happen, I do remember that in my mind I would think “I don’t think that’s how you say this…” or “I don’t remember how to say that” and I would try my best to say the word as correctly as I possibly could, but a lot of times it wasn’t. When she would harshly correct me, I felt awful. I felt stupid! “How hard should it be to accomplish something that other people do every single day!” I felt powerless; this impossible task in front of me often seemed to hard to do, and I eventually started to hate reading aloud. To my sister or anyone. I figured, if I’m not reading aloud to people, then how can I be chastised for making mistakes?

                I soon discovered, however, that the task was not impossible at all! It just required some time and a lot of dedication and hard work. Reading was pretty simple for me once I got the gist of it. In fact, I enjoyed reading and I did it often. In school, we read aloud in class a lot. Once we started to get into books a little more complex than Doctor Seuss, I really enjoyed reading. I read more than just the books and articles that we were assigned to read in class. What made me so interested in reading I think, was the getting to escape for awhile. The sense that no matter what’s happening in real life at that moment, if you just pick up a book or even a magazine, you can take your mind to a different place. At least, that’s why I enjoy it now. When I crack open a book that I know I’m going to like or I continue reading on in a book that I’ve already enjoyed so far, I just love not knowing what will happen next. I think that’s the thrill that anybody gets out of reading. I mean, what’s more exciting than getting to find out something about characters you’ve just met or reading on about someone’s life or anything! There are books out there on just about any subject, and they’re easy to find. So what I enjoyed about reading 14 years ago when I was first learning how to do so, is still what keeps the excitement there for me now.

Narrative on my Literacy Narrative

The writing process can be very long and tedious. Helpful, but tiresome. Effective, but annoying. Right now, we are in the middle of revising literacy narratives.  We have already completed our first and second drafts. The revising hasn’t been too bad yet, just changing a few meanings of paragraphs and the way certain things come across. My main problem was that the beginning and closing of my papers didn’t seem to agree and my audience changed throughout the paper. I rewrote a second draft and I hope I solved those two problems. However, I’m quite sure I’m going to be writing a few more drafts before I’m ready to start editing and such. Although I believe all my ideas agree thus far, I feel like not everything in the paper is stated or comes across to the reader the way I would want it to. I want my paper to be an influence on people teaching young children to read. I want for those people to understand that kindness and not harsh correcting, is the most effective way to help a child in this particular area. My paper implies that, and I state that exact thing many times throughout it, but I would still like to portray my thoughts a little bit different. Right after this blog post, I will also post a copy of my rough draft. It’s not all that great (I mean it’s a rough draft so go figure..) but it’s what came to my mind as I was trying to write this narrative. I had trouble at first starting out my paper, but after I wrote a few sentences and got a couple of thoughts written down, I began to have more and more of an idea of what I wanted my paper to be about. When my paper is finally finished, I will also post the end product and hopefully, they will be quite different, but still have the same main idea and focus.

The coolest blog to EVER exist

To begin the "coolest blog that ever existed", i must confess...this probably isn't going to be the coolest blog that ever existed...probably not even in the top 1,000,000. I just gave it that title to get people interested and to get people to read it, so since you're already reading it, you might as well just keep reading it. Well anyway, what this blog is really about is what i've learned so far in composition 12. So far, there's been a lot of writing and journal entries and searching the web and stuff like that. The writing has been alot, but it hasn't been anything over-bearing or anything like that and they've mostly been about things that are semi-easy to write about. What we've learned about as far as terms and such have been rhetorical analysis, rhetorical situation, good writing, and focused freewrites. The rhetorical situation, by definition, refers to any set of circumstances that involves at least one person using some sort of communication to modify the perspective of at least one other person, according to owl.english.purdue. edu. A rhetorical analysis is when you study a piece of writing, song lyrics, or even just a flyer advertising something and you write down things such as what is the general tone of this writing, who is the audience meant to be, what is the overall main point, and so forth. For good writing, we had to make a checklist for what we think makes something a good piece of writing. We all had different things like no run-on sentences, ideas must make sense, use transitional  words, use a good vocabulary, and brainstorm brainstorm brainstorm!! Lastly, we learned of focused freewrites. By definition, a focused freewrite is basically a chunk of writing that a writer composes in a certain period of time, without the pencil leaving the paper, writing on a certain topic, and writing anything and everything that comes to your mind concerning that topic.