Define key rhetorical concepts including purpose, audience, and genre
Employ critical reading strategies to understand a text’s content and rhetorical choices
Explore personal experiences with reading, writing, and language through the lens of rhetorical concepts
Engage with texts by summarizing, paraphrasing, and responding
Compose a text using the writing process by drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, and editing
Task
Before you enrolled in English 101, you had years of experience with learning in school, family, and community settings. These experiences come with you to the classroom and inform how and why you communicate today. For this assignment, you will write a narrative essay about a significant personal experience with learning that influenced you in some impactful way.
Use a broad definition of literacy as any skills or knowledge in a specific area or discipline. Traditionally, “literacy” means the ability to read and write, but you can also think about learning a language or a new sport, learning how to operate certain kinds of technology (digital or not), learning how to live in a new culture, or how to play a musical instrument. While looking for a topic for your narrative, think about various kinds of knowledge and skills you have: how did you acquire them? What was your learning process? Was there a specific person that helped you learn or influence your learning in some way? How do these skills influence you on a personal level? You can also reflect on the connection between the different types of literacy and your family and social life. Your narrative can focus on a specific event, person, or object (e.g. a significant book you’ve read), or a combination of the three. Your purpose is to present a significant experience with learning new knowledge or skills that has made you who you are as a person, a student, or a writer today.
Your narrative should describe a particular experience, and it should also explain what role this experience has played in your life. Make sure your main point is not too broad or generalized. For example, something like “Learning to read and write helped my life in many ways” sounds like an important point, but it might not work so well because it lacks originality and specific focus (whose life wouldn’t be affected if they could not read or write?).
Finally, consider how your personal experience fits in with the larger context: what kind of issues in our society does it relate to? You can think of political, social, economic, or cultural problems that your narrative can connect to; these connections are what makes people interested in reading literacy narratives.