Essay Literacy Narrative
The Assignment: For this essay, you will write a 3-5 page literacy narrative about a time when you realized something about the value, power, limits, or nature of knowledge or of being a literate person. Your essay should describe and analyze one important scene, experience, or other person who significantly influenced your development as a thinker. You should devote equal time to describing the memory and to considering its significance. While the memory will be engaging for your readers, your narrative will no doubt also tell them something about you and something you've learned about literacy.
Literacy Narratives are (non-fiction) story-telling that re-creates and examines significant past experiences in which reading, writing (or perhaps speaking, listening) figure prominently; literacy narratives focus on key stages or events in one's development as a literate (reading, writing, thinking, speaking, listening) person. A Literacy Narrative is autobiographical, and writing such essays can help you discover and evaluate the role(s) literacy has played in your life, reveal the sources of your present attitudes and abilities, deepen your understanding of how/why you have developed into the kind of reader, writer, thinker, communicator that you have become. A Literacy Narrative prompts you to explore, remember, reflect upon, analyze important moments, experiences, or stages of development in your own personal writing, reading, and thinking development.
YOUR AUDIENCE: Your audience for this essay will be familiar to you (your peers and myself). Because narratives should engage the audience and be entertaining, they tend to be written in a somewhat informal or familiar style. At the same time, because they also should make an elevated point, narratives will be polished and follow conventions of academic writing. You'll want to spend some time considering the style you'll develop in order to be both entertaining and instructive for your audience.