Significant Memory

Essay Instructions:

Literacy Narrative Paper
Paper Length: around 5 typed double spaced pages 12 pt Times New Roman Font
Literacy: A person’s ability to read or write; a person’s knowledge in a particular subject or field. A person’s ability to understand.
Narratives pervade our daily lives: we relate narratives when we talk to our parents, significant others and friends; we strategically narrate stories and identities on social networking sites, like Facebook; we construct narratives to make sense of reality. Indeed, reality, at least our construction of a particular reality, is nothing more than a narrative seen through tinged and various lenses. Simply put, we probably could not function without the ability to narrate our experiences.
A literacy narrative is a story, a story in which an author narrates a particularly significant memory or a strategically sutured sequence of memories involving his/her experience in learning how to write and/or to read.
The Assignment: Your assignment is to construct an engaging literacy narrative in which you describe, in vivid detail, a significant memory or a few sequenced memories involving your experience in learning how to write and/or to read.
Consider the following criteria when writing your essay:
1) What are your earliest memories of learning to read or write?
2) What are some influential books you read? For school? For your own personal enjoyment? Articles? Stories? Poems?
3) What are some influential assignments you completed throughout your schooling? Discuss them?
4) Who are some influential teachers who worked with you or perhaps influenced your own reading or writing?
5) Consider songs, short stories, comics, magazines, or additional periodicals.
6) What are your thoughts about writing? Is it an activity you enjoy or simply an activity you will not use that much in your planned career choice?
7) How did you come to feel this way about writing?
8) How did you come to feel this way about reading?
9) How do you define literacy? How did you develop your own literacy?
10) How do you best access content?
11) If you have children or work with children, how do you encourage their literacy?
12) Examine how you view literacy today.
13) How does technology affect your access to literacy?
14) How do you access information today?
15) How do you educate yourself outside of school?
16) Examine how you value literacy today.
There are no right or wrong answers. Consider these questions and be honest in your responses. You will not hurt my feelings or compromise your grade based upon your answer.

Important Aspects: Your essay needs to:
• Narrate a memory or memories connected to learning how to write and/or read
• Narrate the story in vivid detail and engaging description
• Convey the personal significance of the memory
• Connect with readers, especially in regards to how/why the narrative is meaningful to a broader audience
• Provide some kind of resolution.
What should the essay look like: That depends on how you want to structure your essay and what you want to talk about. Everyone is different, so there is no one “right” way to structure this essay and there are no absolute topics. The important feature is that you consciously choose a structure for this essay that enables readers to better understand your experience with learning how to read and to write.
Invention: Our ongoing class discussions, our frequent analyses of other literacy narratives, and our several discussions regarding criteria and ways to accomplish this assignment will serve as some of your invention work. Moreover, pay special attention to what you do and experience, consciously or unconsciously, each day. Try analyzing them to practice your rhetorical skills.
Evaluation Criteria: An excellent literacy narrative will engage readers immediately, drawing them in with an unusual and/or thought-provoking and/or amusing beginning that also serves to clarify the writer’s purpose. Following this, a convincing array of anecdotes, episodes, or other types of examples will flesh out the narrative. These will be arranged appropriately, helping readers understand your experience in a way that is coherent, and engaging. Please make sure that your stories are focused. Finally, make sure to avoid any writing, spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors in your final draft.

Essay Sample Content Preview:

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Significant Memory
One quote that I find intriguing and directly related to learning how to write is by Jodi Picoult. She said, “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” For me, these words capture the journey one takes as they learn to read and write. First, children capture what their peers are saying and start to imitate them. They say their first words, second words, and soon, they can speak out an entire sentence. When it comes to writing, the same happens. Children start with scribbling with everything they can lay their hands on. They will use colorings, pens, pencils, and everything that appears to shade or leave a mark. While at this stage, children are learning and developing. Eventually, they are able to not only make complete and correct sentences but also write these sentences down. Well, my memories of learning how to read and write do not go that far back when I was mimicking people and using everything I could lay my hands on to write. However, after seeing an old photo of mine pointing to an alphabet chart, I got a flashback of my journey.
Kids learn how to speak before they can learn letters or anything else that relates to reading and writing. So, when I saw that photo, I remember how I loved the chart. First of all, the chart had pictures of objects that started with the corresponding letters. When I saw that old photo, I remembered my mom trying to teach me the letters. At the time, the letters did not make sense to me. They could as well have been drawings themselves. To me, they all did not make sense. However, one thing I remember grasping was the pattern of the letters with their corresponding objects. My mom would point at the letters while pronouncing them. I was to repeat the letters after her, but I always said different things. At this point, I could speak, as any kid could, but I had not comprehended what letters were or how what I was saying was formulated. How I got to learn the letters and corresponding objects is a bit blurry; however, I remember my mom trying to have me point at the pictures after she had said the corresponding letters. Actually, the picture I saw had me pointing at the letter M. I am not sure whether I had gotten the correct answer, and, from time to time, my mom teases me about that time.
The other memory I have about my reading and writing happened in the third grade. Having taught everything we knew at that point as regards reading and writing, Mrs. Bridgette decided to give us homework. She asked us to write about ourselves. She said that we should include details of our families, what we liked or did not like, how we spend time during the weekends and anything we find interesting in our lives. When this assignment was issued, I remember being scared because I wanted to do a good job. However, at this point, this was the biggest writing assignment we had been given. I knew how to speak well, and I could read well at this point. However, writing seemed like an uphill task for me. The assignment was issued on a Friday, and when I got home, my mom immediately knew something was bothering me. She probed, and when I told her about the assignment, she asked me to relax, gave me some ...

Updated on January 26, 2024

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Significant Memory

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