The Importance Of Reading

Years of working several different jobs I started to engaged in the process of creating, understanding, and connecting to knowledge and literacy. I became more involved with my work assignments and connected to and learned materials that were given to me. At the age of thirty six writing is still difficult at times because writing has so many subjective aspects it is more complicated than two plus two equals four. Sometimes I feel if there is not a real purpose for writing it is hard for me to get motivated. However I have learned over the years that literacy helped me with the essential steps, to learn exactly what I needed to earn an important education and career credential. At times I still find it hard to learn

Since a child going up, literacy was not my strong suit. Literacy throughout my life seem not to cope with me. Later as I grew up, literacy meant to me that it is one’s ability to read, write, and speak. More importantly there is a more meaning of literacy, meaning that not only writing, reading, and speaking, but able to understand, analyze, and communicate with other peoples’ ideas. Soon enough literacy has made an impact on my life, it has been and will be a lifelong process. Literacy will always be with me, starting from my past and ending in my future.

Deborah Brandt, professor and author of “Sponsors of Literacy,” has argued that people do not become literate on their own. People, places and everyday life influence how they shape a certain person based on what they 're exposed to. For instance, my teacher shaped the way I write and her being at my institution which is school has shaped me into who I am. I 've become more creative and now I write from the heart. She taught us how to apply our writing to the real world and make a change. If it wasn 't for her class I wouldn 't be such a strong writer and that 's how literacy has helped me succeed.

Reading and writing are both things that we all do in one form or another. For many individuals reading is a way for them to learn and experience new things, that otherwise they would not, and for some, could not do. Writing is a medium we utilize to communicate, that not only compliments speech but allows us to express ourselves, be it our thoughts or emotions, to others; be it a friend down the road or someone half the world away. One of the largest influential things in my life has been books, they have been an integral component within our family’s home. Looking back as far back as I can remember, books weren’t just in our home, they were part of what help make it one. Reading is something that was always encouraged at home by my parents. If there was a book I showed an interest in, or if they would come across a book that they thought that I might like or find interesting, my parents would always get it for me. Both my Mother and Grandmother encouraged writing as well. Both of them were always telling me that I should keep a journal. Reading and writing are a large part of what helps to define us as people in multitudes of ways. One of the most significant is being able to write and read history; and this is my history.

Reading and Writing are essential aspects of life that influence a person’s character and outlook. For all ages, reading and writing expands the mind and exposes the idea to experience new opportunities. Studies show that youthful minds absorb the most information, so learning major concepts are best at earlier ages. My first memories that I can recall of learning how to read and write began at the early age of five years old. Both subjects were such fascinating concepts at the time and my curiosity craved to know more. Fortunately, now that I’ve grown older, reading and writing remain valuable to me because of the circumstances that occurred throughout my life.

Like most of you, I’m a voracious reader and have taught myself many things throughout my life, whether I thought of these pursuits as study or not. I began gobbling up books up before I was in Kindergarten and have continued to devour them until now, regardless of where life took me along the way.

IT is traditionally around first grade when children are taught to read in school. Some children catch on before this with the help of parents, and others are slower to read at expected levels and speeds. I can say without hesitation that my mom sent me on the path to be a reader. My mom is an elementary school teacher and so she started to read to me at a very young age. I have memories of listening to her reading everything from Love You Forever to Little Woman and lots in between. I am fortunate that my mom read to me so much because I picked up reading before going into kindergarten, starting with Goodnight Moon. 1st grade. Taught to read. Had to read for class. Harry potter and the sorcerer's stone, would read on own time, with help from mom. Before this it had primarily been listening to people read to me, small picture books like goodnight moon.

Learning is a part of our daily lives. We learn many new things from family members, friends, and even ourselves. Most importantly, we learn from literature. This includes, books, movies, newspapers, and the Internet that influence us on a daily basis. As a society it’s important to learn the fundamental knowledge of how individuals behave. This concept is known as humanity, which allows individuals to understand the aspect of human society and culture to help educate the future generation. This is done through human interaction. What are the literate arts said to be go be good for? A question that is repeated in different contexts and with different inflections by the writers I have been reading. Three authors prove the point of reference in the benefits of reading and writing. Mary Louise Pratt in “Arts of the Contact Zone” shows that contact zones are places where, cultures, languages, literacy, and ideas all meet to form many different and interesting views. Then, Richard Rodriguez in “The Achievement of Desire” discussed how the literate arts transformed him to a new person with greater knowledge. Thirdly, Richard E. Miller in “The Dark night of the soul” focused on history impacting individuals in many ways. The literate arts have taught us to view literature in different ways, whether they are from others, our personal experiences, or through history.

As a child, I really missed out on the reading and writing train. Being raised in a house with a mother who loved literature and would read often in her free time, my father on the other hand, probably has still to this day never picked up a book in his life. Growing up, my little brother and I spent most of our time with my dad so we never learned the true art of reading and writing. Throughout high school, I spent most of my time in the pool or glued to my phone which left me still oblivious to the world of reading and writing. My life was altered my senior year and I began to cling to reading and writing as a way to escape.

While I was attending elementary school, reading was a crucial piece of my life. I would read almost anything that caught my interest additionally, reading has taught me many critical thinking skills throughout my life. In my third grade class, I had a teacher who I seemed to disagree with a majority of the time, Mr. Johnson. He was a polite man, intelligent, slim, and had dark curly hair. He would assign each student 20 minutes of reading out of class each day, which was always a straightforward task. Library trips were frequent due to us having to read a certain amount of minutes per week.

As a learner, writer, and a reader I consider myself to be strong. In my opinion, these traits add up to create a good English student. Over the course of this year, I have improved greatly as a student and as a learner. Comparing new works of this year to older works I composed at the beginning of this year, I believe that I have not only evolved as a writer, but as a reader and a learner as well. I strongly believe this has been one of the most improved years of my Language Arts career.

My literacy past has been such a journey and there are factors that helped shape it. As I mentioned, the environment I was in, my hometown school alleviated my skills in writing but unfortunately hindered my reading skills as a kid. At my school in Gambia, professors immensely focused on making us great writers from middle school through high school. We would have writing exercises each day and a quiz to test our skills by the end of every week. They will teach us how and where to use punctuations, how to use grammar and style etc. It is basically something that is taking into high consideration. Regardless of us students being taught better writing skills, reading wasn’t taken as serious. I and many other students would be given maybe two books to read each semester. So I wasn’t fond of reading so much, in fact, I would be lazy to read just those two books given to us

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read, “wrote Mark Twain. No matter what part of the world, the different cultures and languages, there has and always will be the written form that must be read to understand our human counterparts and history. Reading can be traced back as far as 3100 BC with content written on limestone and still very much used to day with technology as simple as a text message. The most commonly used language both spoken and literary around the world is English. Growing up in Jamaica, my first experience with literary content was a mixture of English and Patwa, which is a Creole-based language with a predominate English roots. I have been fortunate enough to receive the education necessary to be able to communicate and advance in today’s world through reading and writing. My encounters with words and memories have vastly shaped my academic life.

Reading and Writing matters a lot in today’s society to be successful. I interviewed three individuals on their perspective of reading and writing. Here is a little about them. I first interviewed my cousin LaTeeka Fullum in person. She works at University Hospital as a patient care assistant in the Seidman Center . My cousin LaTeeka has a warm heart; for saving lives. The second person I interviewed, also in person, was my best friend Jessica. She is a registered nurse and works at Cleveland Clinic. Jessica loves spending her time making a healthy lifestyle for others. The third and last interview was with Dr Headen over the phone. He is my grandmother’s foot doctor and has been for thirty-five years.

It seemed like a regular high school day as I walked to my American Literature class in eleventh grade. I was still in the process of waking up even though I had been up for almost four hours already. I had earphones in my ears because I’ll take music over some annoying underclassmen yelling anyday. I walked into class a minute after the bell rang. I didn’t care and neither did my teacher. It was the last class before lunch so nobody really cared. A few minutes later, class started and my teacher announced that she was assigning a book report. My silent reaction spoke a thousand words to my friend sitting next to me as she laughed and said, “Why do you hate reading?” A number of people had asked me this question, but there was something