Literacy Narrative Reflection

Vivienne Do

ENC-1101 Literacy Narrative Reflection

03/22/13

I knew something sooner or later was going to hit me after the first few weeks of English class; our first paper. To be honest, I did not check-out the syllables provided until I started turning in MIA homework assignments. However, it made it clear that our Literacy Narrative would be done in a week’s time. ‘’Bummer’’ I thought, time to actually pull out my cranium and start conjuring up words from it.

The biggest problem I ran into, like most of my papers, was the actual starting of its existence. I struggled for a bit, contemplating to myself which direction should I gear towards when describing the influences of my literacy journey. There were so many strings of reasons attached to shaping of my writing; it would be nearly impossible to base one paper on merely one centralized power source. Naturally, I began to list out all of the different literacy influences I had in mind randomly. This was to help me get me started with ideas. It ranged from culture background to reading cereal boxes. Statistically showing, the overall construction of my literacy could be explained by my instructors. I thought to myself ‘’this is way to common’’ I need to elaborate the cultural personality of my own literacy, thus the development of my essay. For the most part, writing this essay was both exciting and interesting. As I progressed from one chain on thought to the other, it become more apparent what ‘’culture personality’’ I was trying to base my paper off of. The idea that writing, like people, is mainly directly effected by it’s previous educators.

Overall, my peer grade ranged from two B and one A scale. My fellow classmates highlighted the key issues on my paper, mainly that there was a lack of explanation and details. It wasn’t very helpful on my end of the part because ‘’lacking detail’’ is very broad. There was one person who did mention I needed to add more details on how my past instructors influenced my present writing as well as correct my spelling mistakes. When I received my paper graded back, I was a little bit surprised by my marking. 84/100 minus 2 points for not stapling it. ‘’Darn it!’’ I thought quietly to myself as I jammed the paper into my backpack. My heart automatically started to sink down as I regretted not revising it a bit accordingly.

I made it a set goal to raise my grade to at LEAST a 90, this would be the most realistic grade jump in my opinion. I even thought if I just turned in my original paper stapled, would be grade jump up 2 points? Silly me. After class, I headed towards the UCF bookstore to collaborate with my Professor about my score. I simply placed the now crumbled paper on the table and asked him innocently ‘’What did I do wrong?’’ He quickly explained to me it wasn’t what I did wrong, but more-so the lack of what I was doing right. It was rather frustrating hearing feedback that didn’t quite fall into place at first, however, after a few minutes of chatting I soon realized what he meant by this. My paper lacked a framing mechanizes, one that connected one idea to the other, and ultimately those ideas would be webbed under one big general idea. How did my Asian roots correlated directly to the language of English? You speak of Music, but what made it so important as to relation with words? These were the types of questions I started to ask myself in order to seek the information I was missing. The understanding of my past instructors and how they still have impact on the development of my literacy today was the key element was writing this essay.