Personal Narrative: My Literacy Journey

In my opinion, literacy is the foundation of education. To be a reader or writer can encompass a broad definition. It can range in meaning to describe a child who is just learning the sounds letters make when joined together to form a word, to a description of a poet, music producer, and so on. My experience with reading and writing began with the love of my mother, and grew from my continual interest and fascination for greater knowledge.

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.

Literacy plays a huge role in my daily life. Every single day I read and write. Whether it’s writing an email or reading a text message, class assignment, discussion board, etc. My literacy journey is unique because I have had different experiences. As a result, this is how my literacy journey has let me to be the reader that I am.

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.

In first grade, I had started reading, or that is what I recall as my first time. My stuttering problem was always there, but I was a “great reader” according to my teacher Ms. Brown. She was a kind elderly woman, who wanted to see everybody in her class succeed in reading a whole book. Then second grade came at the snap of a finger. There, I wrote my first paragraph full of “mumbo jumbo”. Even though I wrote my first paragraph in second grade, I did not learn about the writing process until high school. After I left high school, I learned that we had barely touched on the writing process due to a significant place in my life… College! In my first English class (Eng 180), my professor went over the ideas of rhetoric, the writing process, and discourse community. Since my old professor did not go in depth on these topics, meant that they were still fresh in my head with no place to stay. In English 280, we went into full detail on these topics and understood more about the meaning and purpose of them all. I know that the writing process includes brainstorming, researching, proofreading, revising, and etc.; however, I felt like I have been doing it all wrong for years. I have made many improvements to my writing due to English 280, but the skills that I improved in the most were researching and synthesizing.

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.

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

Everything that we do requires words. Even when we think we create our memories out of words. One reason why we do not remember stuff when we are young is because we don’t have the words to put the information into to store it. Writing is very important because writing means everything, and if we didn 't have writing, we wouldn 't be able to spread ideas. The local and world news are in writing also so we need to be able to read the information. Also directions on how to use something or directions to go somewhere for transportation are also written in words. It is unimaginable how many roles writing plays in our lifestyles and we don’t even think about it.

It’s crazy to think to myself that about this time last year I never would have thought I would be the person I am today. I have grown in many ways I thought were impossible, and gained experience that shaped me into who I am right now. One thing that stands out to me the most though, as I sit here in my dimly lighted room writing my literacy narrative, is that I have learned to not only enjoy fishing, but to love it. Being outdoors, hiking, fishing, etc., have never been something I have enjoyed, or ever been willing to learn. I always thought to myself, “why waste my time outside getting all sweaty when I could say inside with the AC and do my makeup?” but oh have things change, and ever since this summer, my love for fishing has grown into

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

My literacy path has a lot of exciting events that happened during my childhood. At that time I was inspired by my mother who was my literary guardian, and encourage me at that path. She was the closest person to me at that time. She has been teaching fine art for more than thirty years at one of reputable schools back home. She didn’t settle for that job only. She was cooperating with many other artist running exhibitions that won awards. Five years ago, my mother was promoted to be a supervisor at the ministry of education of all the art instructors over the region. As child whose literary guardian is an artist, I spent most of my time trying to imitate my mother’s painting.

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 earliest memories of reading start when my mom sent me to Christians studying school at six years old and the mentor would read out a handbook on heroes

I have always excelled in academics, but my strongest point was reading, and comprehension. I loved to read as a child, and that has stayed with me throughout life. I’m happy that I had such a love for reading at a young age, as it has helped me immensely in my secondary education, and will probably expand into university too.

I know what makes me happy: Reading. My reading passion started a few years ago and ever since I have not dropped a book. It all started when I was in fifth grade. My teacher Ms. Ortiz encouraged her students more than any other teacher to read! At the time I laughed at the idea of sitting down with a book. I did not have friends since my school was small and filled with kids that did not care much about school. As I started to read the stories filled my heart and made me happy. As the years went by and I started socializing more I stopped seeing reading as a way to forget about the world around me and more of a way to laugh and learn. But, when I am upset, I pick up a book. Reading is something I am passionate about. My favorite thing to