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. This, then, can be a book, a song, a social media site, a film, a video game, anything at all. 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.Īs 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. The foundation of this course is built on your ability to read closely and critically. The literacy narrative assignment will provide an initial inroad for you on this path. 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. Such an author may be an individual very much like yourself or a corporation interested in convincing you to use one of their products. 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. 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. ![]() 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. Writing and reading, then, are activities that happen all the time–even if their form has changed markedly during the past few decades. Furthermore, these digital writing habits, rather than producing a shallower form of writing and reading comprehension, as many might assume, were “help them develop a range or repertoire of writing styles, tones, and formats along with a range of abilities” ( “Our Semi-literate Youth?”). 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?”). Phrases like “no one reads or writes anymore” are thrown about as if they are an unquestionable truth, but reality is another matter. This idea runs counter to common stereotypes of the literacy of our contemporary moment (or lack thereof). Regardless, words and the stories in which they are enmeshed carry immense power, and they surround you in more ways that you might imagine. They can also be complex and unique–such as listening to a source that you trust and respect talk about what you should aspire to in life and what compromises you should and shouldn’t be willing to make along the way. These narratives and the situations that they inhabit can be simple and commonplace–like you telling a parent or sibling about how your day went, from the difficulties that you faced to the good moments that kept you going. Everything that you know or experience has been conveyed to you as a narrative of some sort, and you, in turn, depend on narrative to tell your story to the world. Stories shape the realities that we experience on a daily basis and on every level imaginable. ![]() ![]() However, as a human being, you are, by your very nature, enthralled to the power of narrative. Perhaps you don’t believe that there is really much purpose to writing. Maybe you aren’t someone who writes much at all. ![]() Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale
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