Literacy Narratives: Overview

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

This idea runs counter to common stereotypes of the literacy of our contemporary moment (or lack thereof). Phrases like “no one reads or writes anymore” are thrown about as if they are an unquestionable truth, but reality is another matter. In a landmark study of student writing habits at Stanford University in 2001, noted scholar Andrea Lunsford and colleagues discovered that their students were writing constantly and in an unimaginable range of environments: “These students did plenty of emailing, and texting; they were online a good part of every day; they joined social networking sites enthusiastically” (“Our Semi-literate Youth?”). Furthermore, these digital writing habits, rather than producing a shallower form of writing and reading comprehension, as many might assume, were “help[ing] them develop a range or repertoire of writing styles, tones, and formats along with a range of abilities” (“Our Semi-literate Youth?”). Writing and reading, then, are activities that happen all the time–even if their form has changed markedly during the past few decades.

Literacy narratives offer you an opportunity to reflect back on your own journey as a writer and reader, whether in a traditional or digital context. Perhaps most importantly, in revisiting your path up to this point and where you see the journey taking you into the future, you can gain a sort of perspective and agency that often isn’t possible in the moment. And, as this semester unfurls and your writing and reading abilities improve, you will, as Atwood indicates, gain increased power–both over the narratives that you author and put out into the world as well as those that you receive and which seek to gain your attention on behalf of their author. Such an author may be an individual very much like yourself or a corporation interested in convincing you to use one of their products. Regardless, your ability to engage, analyze, and respond to these outside narratives will give you increased agency in a world in which the number of narratives and authors are increasing exponentially. The literacy narrative assignment will provide an initial inroad for you on this path.

Everything is a Text!

The foundation of this course is built on your ability to read closely and critically. To engage with this skill, and the multiple literacies we navigate on a daily basis, this first major essay is a personal piece in which you will explore a significant moment regarding your own literacy; you may approach literacy either in the traditional sense or using our expanded, modern definition.

As you move through this chapter and related course resources, remember that a “text” in the context of this assignment, and in twenty-first-century composition studies in general, is anything that conveys a narrative to you–regardless of the medium. This, then, can be a book, a song, a social media site, a film, a video game, anything at all. As philosopher Jacques Derrida famously said, “Everything is a text.” In this sense, writing about your experience creating art or making music would fall under the purview of a “literacy narrative.” When you think through the essay that you would like to create below, make sure that you choose a topic that is authentic to your own experience, your own journey, and, perhaps most importantly, something that you are interested in continuing to explore through writing and reflection.

Use the following content, which has been adapted from Leslie Davis and Kiley Miller’s First-Year Composition, to plan your literacy narrative assignment.

ASSIGNMENT SHEET

Section One: Rhetoric and Personal Narrative

The foundation of our course is built on your ability to read closely and critically. To engage with this skill, and the multiple literacies we navigate on a daily basis, this project is a personal piece in which you will explore a significant moment regarding your own literacy; you may approach literacy either in the traditional sense or using our expanded, modern definition.

Exploring Literacy

What comes to mind when you hear the term “literacy”? Traditionally, we can define literacy as the ability to read and write. To be literate is to be a reader and writer. More broadly, this term has come to be used in other fields and specialties and refers generally to an ability or competency.

For example, you could refer to music literacy as the ability to read and write music; there are varying levels of literacy, so while you may recognize the image below as a music staff and the symbols for musical notes, it’s another thing to name the notes, to play any or multiple instruments, or to compose music.

Or, you may be a casual football fan, but to be football literate, you would need to be able to understand and read the playbook, have an understanding of the positions, define terms like “offsides” or “holding” as they relate to the sport, and interpret the hand signals used by the referees.

Educator and writer Shaelynn Faarnsworth describes and defines literacy as “social” and “constantly changing.” In this unit, we’ll explore literacy as a changing, dynamic process. By expanding our definition of literacy, we’ll come to a better understanding of our skills as readers and writers. We’ll use this discussion so that you, as writers, can better understand and write about “what skills [you] get and what [you] don’t, [and include your] interests, passions, and quite possibly YouTube.”

Checking In: Questions and Activities

1. Consider our expanded definition of literacy. In what ways are you literate? What activities and/or hobbies do you value? How do they help give meaning to your world?
2. When, where, and how do you read and write on a daily basis? These activities can occur in traditional formal contexts or in the most informal situations (like writing in group text message threads with your friends or posting on specific social media sites).
3. Thinking of traditional literacy (reading and writing), what successes or challenges have you faced in school, at home, in the workplace, etc.?

Close Reading Strategies: Introducing the Conversation Model

Reading is a necessary step in the writing process. One helpful metaphor for the writing process is the conversation model. Imagine approaching a group of friends who are in the middle o

f an intense discussion. Instead of interrupting and blurting out the first thing you think of, you would listen. Then as you listen, you may need to ask questions to catch up and gain a better understanding of what has already been said. Finally, once you have this thorough understanding, you can feel prepared to add your ideas, challenge, and further the conversation.

Similarly, when writing, the first step is to read. Like listening, this helps you understand the topic better and approach the issues you’re discussing with more knowledge. With that understanding, you can start to ask more specific questions, look up definitions, and start to do more driven research. With all that information, then you can offer a new perspective on what others have already written. As you write, you may go through this process — listening, researching, and writing — several times!

This unit focuses first on the importance of reading. There are two important ways we’ll think about reading in this course. Close reading and critical reading are both important processes with difference focuses. Close reading is a process to understand what is being said. It’s often used in summaries, where the goal is to comprehend and report on what a text is communicating. Compared to critical reading, an analytical process focused on how and why an idea is presented, close reading forces us to slow down and identify the meaning of the information. This skill is especially important in summaries and accurately quoting and paraphrasing.

Close reading, essentially, is like listening to the conversation. Both focus on comprehension and being able to understand and report back on what is written or said. In this project,

Checking In: Questions and Activities

1. Within close reading, your processes could be further broken down into pre-reading, active reading, and post-reading strategies. What do you focus on before and after you read a text?
2. There are many ways to read closely, and being an intentional reader will help ensure you process what you read and recall it later. However, there are many ways to actively read.

Consider assignments you’ve been given in the past:

• • Have your instructors asked you to annotate a text?
  • Do you find yourself copying down important lines, highlighting, or making notes as you read?
  • What strategies do you rely on to actively and closely read?
  • What are your least favorite strategies?

The Rhetorical Situation

You may have heard of “rhetorical questions” or gotten frustrated watching the news when a commentator dismisses another by saying “that’s just empty rhetoric” — but what does rhetoric mean? With definitions dating back to Aristotle and Plato, this is a complex concept with many historical and contemporary definitions. We define rhetoric as the ways language and other communication strategies are used to achieve a purpose with an audience. Below, we’ll explore the rhetorical situation, examining how many different factors contribute to how a writer can achieve their goals, and what may influence them to make different decisions.

The rhetorical situation is composed of many interactive pieces that each depend on the other. Let’s start by defining each component:

• Author: The creator. This is the person responsible for making the decisions in a text. For your writing, you are the author, even though you’ll get ideas and feedback from many other places. Though it seems like this component may be an easily determined constant, sometimes publishers have an idea and then approach a specific writer to accomplish the task, which could limit the choices and decisions that the author makes.
  • Ask yourself: Who created this?
• Audience: The intended readers or viewers. There are many ways to identify this group — you may describe characteristics of the group, like their nationality, gender, age, or other relevant factors. It may help to think of the audience as an identity group: for example, you probably identify as a student, and that means you have something in common with other readers of this text: you are interested in learning, you are educated, and you speak English. You may have different backgrounds and experiences, but there are some qualities we can assume a student possesses. Your role and experience with this text as a student is different than the role of instructors who are using this book for their course, and instructors similarly share some qualities while others differ. This process does force you to make some assumptions, but taking steps to define and describe the readers of a text helps understand who they are, what’s important to them, and how they’ll interpret a text.
  • Ask yourself: Who is likely to, or supposed to, see this?
• Text: The artifact. This paragraph is a type of text, which is a little different than this entire book as a text. More broadly, we can think about texts as whatever is being consumed: the billboard on your drive home, the trailer you watch before the actual movie, the clothes you’re wearing, and the birthday card you’re sending could all be interpreted as different types of texts, each with a different author, intended for different audiences. Often in academic contexts, we’ll use the term text and genre interchangeably because they both refer to the category type of what is being read or consumed. For example, novels are categorized by genre, such as science fiction or romance. There are many academic genres that we’ll review, such as editorials, book reviews, peer-reviewed journals, and more.
  • Ask yourself: What am I looking at?
• Purpose: The goal. Whatever the text, every genre or author has a goal in mind. This can be more simply reduced to a strong verb that describes the goal: to persuade, to refute, to argue, to defend, to sell, etc. Some genres have easily identifiable purposes. That billboard is clearly trying to sell the product, while the movie trailer is trying to entertain or to sell tickets. While texts may have several goals, we’ll try to identify the primary, most appropriate, goal to help focus our close and critical reading of the text. In this book, our goal is to educate you by introducing all these new concepts so you can apply these strategies in your writing.
  • Ask yourself: Why was the text created?
• Context: The situation around the text. Context is compiled from a lot of different factors. When reading, you may have been told to guess the meaning of a word based on context clues and this definition is similar. Consider the situation around the text and what influenced the creation of the text, and how it may influence the other components. For example, reading a text about rhetoric from 400 BCE would be very different than one written 100 years ago, and this one you’re reading now is also different. Or, 1,000 words may seem like a lot, and it would make for a very long poem or text message, but the average novel is at least 50,000 words and hundreds of pages. All of these different factors fall into the context that shapes what is created. The writing you’ll do in this course is shaped differently than what you might accomplish for your history or psychology courses because the context changes for each course and assignment.
  • Ask yourself: When was this created? How did it get developed? Where was the text published? What shaped the creative process?

Each of these categories intersects and influences the other. When we think about a complete rhetorical situation, you’ll need to define all these different pieces to best understand the text. As we begin practicing close reading, drawing the rhetorical situation will be a helpful tool.

Let’s examine this project, the literacy narrative.

• Author: You! While you have a unique background, you’re a student in this course, and your individual writing experience will influence what you write about.
• Audience: Your classmates and instructor. This is a collaborative course, and your instructor will read what you produce.
• Text: Literacy Narrative. This type of text has different goals and requirements. We’ve examined literacy already, and we’ll review narratives soon. Together, these guidelines will help us construct this specific type of text (rather than a poem about reading or your personal memoir about how you became a writer!).
• Purpose: To reflect. To introduce yourself. To define your literacy. These are all goals of this assignment. Throughout your assignment, you’ll want to check in with yourself and ensure that you’re accomplishing these goals. If not, you won’t meet the demands of the assignment.
• Context: This assignment — the assignment sheet above has specific requirements that will influence what you create. Your writing background — no one else has the same life experience with reading and writing as you. The goals of the course — there are specific tasks to accomplish with this project that are specific to course outcome objectives. Each of these aspects will influence how you put the project together. Since you didn’t just wake up and decide to write about literacy, the context of this assignment will determine what you create.

Checking In: Questions and Activities

1. Which of the elements of the rhetorical triangle influence your writing decisions most? Why?
2. Are there any elements you don’t consider? Why don’t they seem as important?

Section 2: Defining Narrative and Organization

Now that we’ve reviewed some basics, let’s take a look at the assignment more fully, begin drafting, and work more closely with feedback from others. A literacy narrative is a specific type of genre, so there are certain requirements for this text. Using examples from other students, we’ll begin to develop your first draft.

Introducing the Literacy Narrative

narrative: a method of story-telling 

A literacy narrative is a common genre for writers who want to explore their own experiences with writing. Just Google “literacy narrative” and find endless examples! While this assignment will respond to specific prompts and follow a more specific structure than some of the examples you’ll find on Google, there is a common theme in each essay that revolves around your relationship with literacy. Section One defined literacy,  but what about narrative? Narrative can be defined as a method of story-telling. In the simplest terms, your goal in this literacy narrative, in this assignment, is to tell the story of your personal experience with literacy, either from a past event, something you’re working with now, or looking to the future. Let’s review the three sets of prompts from the assignment sheet:

• Describe a situation when you were challenged in your reading by describing the source of that challenge (vocabulary, length, organization, something else). How did you overcome that challenge to understand what the text was saying? What strategies or steps do you plan to take in the future to make the process easier? This can range from reading a difficult novel to trying to play a particularly complicated song.
• Describe the type of texts you read (watch, listen to, etc.) most often. What makes them easy or challenging to read and interpret? What strategies do you use to ensure that you fully understand them or can apply them? Again, remember that these activities can occur in traditional formal contexts or in the most informal situations (like writing in group text message threads with your friends or posting on specific social media sites). Listening to music and watching true crime documentaries also count as listening to and watching texts.
• Describe what kind of texts you think you will have to read or interpret in the future and where you will encounter these texts (i.e. future classes, your career, etc.). How do you think they might challenge you? What strategies will you use to overcome these difficulties?
• What non-traditional topics could you write about for this project? What activities and/or hobbies do you value? How do they help give meaning to your world?

Each of these prompts gives you the chance to tell your story and examine your experience with a specific type of literacy. As you consider the prompts, think about how you could tell a story to answer these questions. With this frame of mind, review the questions and activities below.

Checking In: Questions and Activities

1. Which prompt from the assignment sheet will you address? Why does this prompt appeal to you?
2. Consider the brainstorming you did about the ways that you are literate. Which prompt matches those skills best? Are these skills you struggled with at first, skills you currently practice, or a skill that you’re learning and will use in the future? Use these notes to decide which set of questions you’ll focus on in this project.

Organization: PIE Method

Each prompt includes three questions, which we’ll use as the starting point for three paragraphs. In each set of prompts, your first paragraph will describe the text; remember, when thinking about reading a text, we can interpret this broadly, like with music and sports. The second paragraph will explore the challenges or successes you’ve experienced. Then, the third paragraph will focus on strategies and techniques for improvement. This way, you can tell a more complete story of your experience, sharing the details and emotions along the way and making readers feel like they’re right there with you. But how do you capture all this detail in a way that helps you organize your thoughts and keep your reader interested in the story?

We’ll use a formula for the paragraph structure called PIE, which stands for Point, Information, and Explanation. This method will help you plan what you want to say, and then give examples so you can show why each step was so important to you. Let’s review each part of the paragraph, and then we’ll look at how this applies to your literacy narrative with a student sample.

• Point: To start, every paragraph needs a Point, a main idea and the reason you’re writing. The goal of this first line is to summarize what you’re going to tell your readers.  You can usually present this idea in a single sentence. Introduce the main idea of the paragraph.
  • In the literacy narrative: Since each paragraph responds to a question from the prompt, the Point of each paragraph should tell readers which question you’re answering. By rephrasing the question in your Point, you can signal to your classmates and instructor so that they know which question you’re answering.
• Information: Every paragraph needs evidence or specific examples. These are the details that you can report. You may have several examples in mind, and you may need to offer names, quotes, or paraphrases of what you said or read. This could take multiple sentences to describe but should rely on the facts that you can name, NOT your reaction or analysis.
  • In the literacy narrative: Most of your evidence, in a narrative, will be from your experience. Report what happened, what you read, or what you learned. Naming these details can help your readers see through your eyes when you give specific examples.
• Explanation: This is how you make your examples come to life! In the Information, you reported on the what, and now it’s your chance to describe the why  and how. This is the most important, and therefore the longest, part of the paragraph where you make sense of the Information and tell your readers what it all means to you. The explanation includes analysis that builds on the evidence provided.
  • In the literacy narrative: Help your readers get inside your head and feel like they’re with you. Keeping the Point in mind and showing how all these ideas relate will bring the paragraph together by developing each example clearly and offering a thoughtful response to each prompt. How did you feel about the examples from the Information? Why was it was so significant? Why should your readers care about this experience? Answering these questions will help show your readers what you experienced so they can understand the significance and connect with you.

Together, these pieces all come together to create a strong, developed paragraph that responds to the question from the prompt more fully.

Checking In: Questions and Activities

1. Below is a sample paragraph that follows the PIE structure. It is coded for the different parts of the paragraph above, with the Point in bold, the Information in italics, and the Explanation underlined. The second paragraph has been shortened and has not been coded. First, review the parts of the coded example. Pay particular attention to how these elements work in harmony to build the paragraph. Then, review and identify the PIE elements in the second paragraph.

Planning a Draft

Now that we’ve reviewed all the components and the foundation for this assignment, you’re ready to begin your draft! We’ll focus just on the first paragraph here, but you can use these steps for each paragraph to construct your draft.

Consider the first question from each prompt, copied below, to decide if you’ll focus on a past experience, the present, or the future:

• Describe a situation when you were challenged in your reading by describing the source of that challenge (vocabulary, length, organization, something else). 
• Describe the type of texts you read (watch, listen to, etc.) most often. 
• Describe what kind of texts you think you will have to read or interpret in the future and where you will encounter these texts (i.e. future classes, your career, etc.). 
• Describe your preferred mode of expressing yourself and communicating with the world.

Section Three: Peer Review and Revision

Peer Review

Peer review is an important part of the drafting process. It helps us learn from our classmates and see our own work in a different way. Writing can be a lonely and isolating experience that makes the process frustrating and unsatisfying. Getting to share your work with others can break that uncomfortable pattern!

That said, you may be new to sharing your work or have different experiences with peer review. Good peer reviews can spark creativity, help build on good ideas, and revise the rougher ideas. But, sometimes peer review can be challenging if your peer is too critical or too complementary, or maybe you can’t read and understand what they wrote! The tips below will help reinforce best practices, as well as avoid some common mistakes with peer review.

When completing peer review, one important rule is to focus on the big picture and NOT to edit. Think about it like this: If you add a comma, then you’ve helped make one sentence of the paper better. In a paper that’s 1,000 words long, that’s not so helpful! Instead, consider the rhetorical triangle. If you can make observations and ask questions to help your classmate understand the audience or the genre better, then the entire paper is going to improve, because you focused on a higher order concept that affects not just one sentence, but the paragraph and the whole paper. Throughout these projects, we’ll practice several strategies for peer review so you can see several example methods and find what works best for you.

Checking In: Questions and Activities

1. Review the same sample paragraph below from a previous student. Identify one strength and one area for improvement in the draft, following the 3-step method above. As you review, consider how to balance praise and criticism. Something is going well in your peer’s draft, and something can be improved!

Most of this week revolves around drafting activities. This week brings our first revisions and peer reviews, an important part of the writing process. With your peers, you’ll get to review what they’ve been working on while receiving feedback on your own work. Similar to the sample, it will be your responsibility to identify strengths and praise your peers’ writing, as well as identify areas for improvement and explain why this is an important revision they must make.

Applying Peer Review: Taking Suggestions and Revising

Once you’ve completed peer review, you’ll likely have lots of ideas — reviewing others’ work often ignites a creative spark for your own work! You should feel free to apply strategies from your peers and reexamine your work, but you want to focus on your peers’ suggestions for you. This way, you can see how your ideas and their commentary lines up. In our 3-step feedback process, the last step is to make a suggestion. While the notes from your peers should be valuable, it’s ultimately your draft and your decision about what feedback to include. As you read through the commentary, review the assignment sheet, and begin making changes to the draft. This is one of the most important steps in the writing process and what makes the difference between a rough first draft and a polished, complete draft.