Personal Narrative: Improving Literacy Skills

In today’s society reading is essential to function. Everywhere people turn they are required to read directions, labels, books, what’s going on in the news, or mandatory rules they need to follow. Just think about if a majority of the world couldn’t read how chaotic society would be.

My literacy narrative focused on an event, which changed my perspective towards reading. This event revolved around my life and later resulted in a better version of myself. It was about a competition for which I appeared during my freshman year in high school. There were some key points, which I noticed while working on my literacy narrative. Throughout my work, I enjoyed the ways of employing the five authentic skills that enriched my narrative with not just my words, but also with my emotions that are associated to it.

English has never been my favorite class to take. I was more interested in math because there is one answer to a question and that is it. With English, everyone writes differently. Style is difficult to grade and there is not a yes or no answer to an essay.

My literacy journey had begun earlier than most kids, according to my mother. I started reading in kindergarten, with help with the BOB books and the PBS show Between the Lions. I don’t know when I had started writing exactly, but I remember clearly writing short stories about my cat Stormy in 3rd grade. At that time we had to write weekly short stories, and I only ever wrote about my cat. In 4th grade, I had started exploring writing more; I would write plays for me and my friends to practice during recess. Most of them, I’m happy to say, were actually educational, so my teacher had even let my friends and I perform one about early-American settlers in front of our whole class.

I believe that my literacy past has affected the reader and writer I am today. There is a lot I can talk about that has has an effect on me being the reader and writer I am today. One being the country and environment I lived in as a kid. In Gambia teachers don’t take reading seriously as they should. We as nursery students, focused more on learning how to spell and doing the math and also writing. We weren’t giving much books to read, maybe one or two books the whole semester. And because of that, I wasn’t a fond reader. Regardless of us not given books to read, we were giving many writing exercises so that really helped. My family however thought that reading is very important and because of that, they bought my siblings and I lots of book

A literacy narrative is quite often thought of as a personal account as to how the written word has affected one’s life. My literacy narrative, however, embodies my passion of art to define who I am and how it has determined who I have become. Photography has been a dominant part of my life since I was born; my mom loved to take pictures of me playing and she would get in pictures with me wherever we traveled. She would buy these cheap, disposable cameras in bulk and just let us kids play with them or she would take enough pictures of us that we felt like her little models. Sometimes, she would even develop the film she thought might be promising and add the photos to our baby albums she cherished so deeply. My mom was my budding inspiration for photography, and she is still my biggest supporter today. I have to thank the twenty-first

This week, my literacy narrative actually wasn't that hard to write. Consider, that I recieve quite a few helps from peer review during class. I found the peer reviews to be really helpful. Although I don't really remember what we discussed in class. But having the peer review questions as a references was a really big help. Therefore, I understand what I needed to strengthen my paper on. So, during the writing process, I know what to focus on. Still, it was really difficult coming up with ways of how to connect the story together, making then flow nicely. Personally, I am well aware that the shift of my story is too fast, but I has no ideas of how to connect them together. Since, I hardly write in first person I kind of has no clude on how

While the achievements I’ve earned are valuable, what I have learned from this process is significant. I’ve learned how to act in a professional environment and how to be a quality competitor in not just Speech, but in all my activities. Furthermore, I have acquired the ability to digest and comprehend criticism. As well as giving me the opportunity to be a leader on my team, Speech has also taught me to be a leader amongst my peers. To me, Speech is more than a place to excel in speaking, it is where I have gained knowledge and skills that will assist me in my future

Diving into past memories is something I am never found of. There is a lot of pain hidden behind some of my past experiences, but also a lot of triumph. It is always interesting to force yourself to retrieve some of those hidden memories. Sometimes the things you remember can be very surprising. Things that seemed long forgotten, can abruptly come back in a flash. The farthest memory I can recall about my own literacy experience is when I began first grade. At this stage, I remember feeling very confused about the whole purpose of going to school. I felt as if I was the only one not being able to keep up with the other children. I didn’t know what was cool, how to make friends, or even know how to play board games like “Candyland.” I was just not exposed to certain things that the other children in my class were aware of prior to beginning first grade. Most of all, I did not like learning. I liked doing things

My first main literacy who be my relationship with God, oh how I need him every day, I could write endlessly about this one, I feel strongly about my connection with the father and it makes me happy to even know the enjoy it has bought into my life .Oh how my soul rejoices every time I think about how much I need him every day he is the center of my peace and I could not start my day without him. He knows my name he is definitely my main literacy every day. The next main literacy would be my job and which I need that in order to live in this world and be a productive citizen in this society. To have money to sustain my lifestyle. My final literacy would be my whole family. They mean the world to me, there is nothing more important to me than

In all honesty, I don't remember a lot about becoming literate. I didn't have a special moment or time when I knew that reading or writing going to take me somewhere. According to my mom she started to read to me when I was one, so there wasn't anything that could've excelled me much farther before going into kindergarten. One of the requirements in elementary school was to read every night which I believe was an important factor of me improving my literacy. Reading and writing used to me excite me because I would immerse myself into a book or write a whole new universe on a page. I made reading and writing something personal to me. I now realize that every book and every piece of writing can be worthwhile in one way or another.

Throughout my childhood, college education has always been a concept in the minds of my parents and I. As a result, it was my duty to excel in my studies and achieve that idea of having great success. In order to pursue that dream I had to learn how to read and write which had many ups and downs. Therefore, my youth was overtaken by many hours learning how to read and write in the correct “Standard” English.

My earliest experience with reading and writing were traumatizing especially when I was in the first grade. I still recall the experience I went through to this day. It made me really hate myself because the other kids were making fun of me.

In Honors Intro to Business & Tech, I was introduced to two new programs. The first being “Marketplace” and the other being “Toastmasters.” Toastmasters is a program led at Chestatee High School by Kimberly Holland. The purpose of Toastmasters is to offer people a way to improve their communication, public speaking, and leadership skills. To improve my skills as a speaker, I went through training and speeches. At the beginning, I required the use of notecards just to know what to say next. As time went by, I didn’t require notecards anymore to speak my speech. We had three speeches in total to perform and each speech, I got better. Our final product was our third speech. The third speech was a speech about inspiring others or what inspires

Tick-Tock: This exercise helped me realize just how distorted my thinking process is and how I tend to have inferior thoughts. For my fear, I wrote that I was worried that my lack of social confidence and outspokenness would limit my success in my future career as a communicator. I counteracted this fear by highlighting my positive traits that contradict this distorted belief. I wrote that I have both the oratorical and writing skills and organizational mindset to be successful within my field; I only have to remember that people are just that, people, and are the same species as me. I am fully capable of being conversational. In order to be oratorically successful, all I have to do is think about what it is I want to convey and then simply put it into words, just as I am able to do when writing. Although I may be slower than others at expressing myself verbally, this is a strength because it means that I tend to think deeply about matters and want to clearly express myself, as opposed to saying meaningless words. This activity taught me to highlight my positive traits whenever I am doubtful of myself, which is a good habit that will benefit me for the rest of my life.