Memorandum
TO: Missy Watson
FROM: Raisa Tahsin
DATE: February 23rd, 2019
SUBJECT: Language and Literacy Narrative
Summary:
The primary objective of the phase one essay, the language and literacy narrative, is to hone into a specific memory of reading or writing and explore how this affected their relationship with literacy and the overall impact the memory had. For my literacy narrative, my goal was to explain to readers how reading Percy Jackson and the Olympianschanged my outlook on life and how a female protagonist became an inspiration and role model. I wanted to exemplify through my writing how reading the series helped me over come societal pressure put on me by Bengali norms. The main technique I used in writing my narrative was using an outline and breaking my essay into parts to analyze it to ensure everything flows well. From the entire writing process, I learned how to better organize my writing, what techniques work well and what techniques I should change or improve. The main recommendation I have for my writing is to focus on the flow of my essay, transitions and continue to develop my voice in my writing.
Methods:
The first thing I did was create an outline detailing the paragraphs I wanted to include and the information I wanted in each paragraph. Using the outline made it easier for me to know what I wanted to include and to thoughtfully divide the information and ideas I had. Creating an outline also gave me a sense of what my essay would be like and the main points from early on. Furthermore, the outline allowed me to be able to write parts of my essay separately and I worked on bringing everything together in the end. Another method I used to write my narrative was analyzing each paragraph and seeing what the main idea was of each one and how it contributed to my holistic paper. I really wanted to ensure that the theme of self-discovery was prevalent, and I wanted to make it clear how literature affected me so analyzing each paragraph separately and then the entire paper helped me visualize what ideas the reader would get from my writing and if those ideas were what I wanted to portray.
One homework assignment that helped me write my narrative was reading “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You” by June Jordan. In this reading, Jordan intertwined two different stories into one and her writing gave me ideas on how to incorporate my narrative and my best friends in one and how to make it flow. In addition, the spoken literacy narrative helped with writing my revised literacy narrative. When reading my script out loud, I got a good sense on what worked in my narrative and what didn’t. Based off the reactions and comments I received from the class I knew what I did well and should try to do more and I knew what wasn’t as powerful and maybe should be edited.
I used these specific methods because I know I struggle with organizing my writing and finding a good structure that flows so breaking down my essay and looking at it in parts and in the end putting everything together gave me a good sense of the structure I had going and made any unclarities visible. The homework assignments and class work served as inspiration for my narrative and also as guidelines as to what I should and should not do. I got many ideas from the readings, my classmates and the reaction my narrative got from an audience.
Results:
Overall, this assignment taught me better organizational skills in my writing, helped me develop a unique writing style/voice, showed me what I am good at when it comes to writing and things I should continue to do in the future and showed me where I struggle when it comes to writing so I know what I have to work on and practice. Writing my narrative, editing it multiple times, and writing it in a different form (spoken narrative) helped me “enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.” These processes gave me the opportunity to hone my writing skills and improve the methods I used to revise, draft and edit. Reading all the assigned readings, writing my language and literacy narrative, reading other’s narratives and listening to everyone’s spoken narratives helped me “recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users.” Everyone in class had such unique narratives but one theme that was common was how at first language was a hindrance in their development, but they came to terms with it and this helped discover who they were. For me, I was born in America and I never struggled with learning English but listening to others’ stories where English was their second language was very eye opening for me and I learned a lot about what literacy really is and the different kinds of language one can speak.
Conclusions/Recommendations:
The most important thing I learned from writing this literacy narrative and going through the entire process, was mainly organizational skills. I learned how to analyze the structure of my writing and see what flows and what doesn’t. intertwining someone else’s narrative with mine was a challenge but working through it is what taught me how to fix structure and look at my essay in different ways.
Some suggestions I have for myself as a writer and for my writing include to keep working on my organizational skills and try to be more creative and loose with my writing, stylistically, by adding more dialogues and experimenting with informal conversation within my essay to create a sense of familiarity with the audience.
