LK
For this section, I have decided to include the process associated with my Literacy Narrative. This was one of my favorite essays to write, mainly because I have not written like this in school for quite some time. I remember doing the class assignment on what the rules of writing are, and discussing how there are basically no set rules for writing. For the past four years of high school, writing was always a five-paragraph essay in third person. This narrative was a new experience for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked writing in first person, and being able to include my thoughts on the subject and experiences to tie in to the bigger idea of literacy. Often in writing third person essays in high school English classes, I found myself wishing I could include a personal experience that would relate to whatever I am analyzing. This time I could. This essay was not an easy one, despite how much I liked writing it. The point of the essay was to reflect on and explore our multiple literacies, and connect those to our identities and the communities/cultures around us. Since in my essay I was essentially writing about writing, it took a lot of thought to distinguish different literacies within the realm of my writing. My planning helped greatly with that, because when I started to write the ideas just flowed. The first draft was nowhere near perfect, but I believe I was able to improve it quite a bit with the help of my peers' comments. I have never reviewed papers or and mine reviewed in the way I did in this class. I was used to editing grammar and punctuation and correcting mistakes, not looking for a way the person could extend or clarify their essay. Getting in a group with several people, they were able to help me see parts I needed to work on that I had been blind to. It really helped to have multiple opinions so I could say, "oh, yeah. Maybe that isn't completely clear after all." The teacher comments were also very beneficial. There was praise thrown in with suggestions that made me feel more confident about my essay. Often teachers and professors just give a grade and point out mistakes, and do not attempt to point out what the student did right, but that was not the case here. By the time I polished up my revised essay to the final version, I felt better about what I was correcting and exactly why I was correcting, and I felt satisfied that parts I were unsure about seemed alright.
The slideshow to the left is a collection of my thinking and planning in my daybook before I started to write. The first picture is of one of the assignments in our daybook. We had to write three narratives, each a page long. A peer in the class gave us feedback, and from out of those three, we chose one. This is the one I chose.
This is my first draft of my essay. I used the planning and outlines I set up (see above) to help guide me through the process of starting this essay. This was a tentative first draft, as it went on to be edited by my peers both in class and online.
This slideshow shows my first draft, along with comments from my peers and edits from myself. Peer comments were done in black pen by the group reviewing my essay. Any comments or edits I made are in red ink and yellow highlighter. I made my revisions after they had finished commenting, so I could take their suggestions into account. The parts I changed I did according to what other people felt as they read my essay, and I tried to improve the clarity of what I was saying and elaborate a little bit more.
This is the draft I revised after receiving many peer comments. I took those comments and used them to make my own edits to the hard copy of my first draft (see above). I also had my mother, who is a literacy facilitator in a school, review it to make sure it was revised to the best of my ability.
This is my revised draft, complete with teacher comments. I wrote all my revisions and edits on a printed out copy of the teacher-edited version of my essay. I heeded the suggestions in blue, and I added a few more details here and there to be clearer. I also highlighted the grammatical errors in the paper so I knew to fix them. It really helped me that there was time in between when I submitted the revised draft and when I got it back, because I could distance myself from the essay and come back to it again, fresh and ready to change things.
This the final draft of the paper I submitted. I used the teacher comments to make my own edits on the revised draft, and then I set out to change a few things and improve my essay for the last time.
The second and third pictures are of my actual essay planning and outline in my daybook. They acted as a space for me to write all the thoughts I had down and get a general structure and feel for this essay. (The third page is a continuation of the second.) After I planned, I began to write! I tried to incorportate as many ideas from all three of these pages as I could.
The last three pictures are of overall peer comments instead of specific notes written on the essay. The fifth picture is of a page in my daybook, where I wrote down some questions I had about my essay and my peers answered these questions in paragraph form below. The sixth and seventh photos are screenshots of Moodle forum posts. Once again I asked some questions that could help me with revisions, and my peers read the essay online and commented with their suggestions. I found this extremely helpful in creating my revised draft, which I later submitted.
My Kind of Writing: Working with my Literacy Narrative
Overall, I enjoyed writing this Literacy Narrative and being able to have a chance to explain not only some of my multiple literacies, but how writing in particular has shaped my life, my connections with the people and things around me, and who I am as a person. I also enjoyed the new experiences in editing my essay— peer revisions and specific and personal teacher comments. Furthermore, it is very interesting and oddly satisfying to see all of my work on this essay displayed below, starting from the seed of an idea and watching it "blossom" into my final draft.