Reflective Essay

James L. Dunn
ENGL B8104 2TU
Basic Writing Theory & Practice
December 16, 2014

Reflective Essay

Composition teachers tell students that writing is a process that involves invention, revision, proofreading and editing.  The hope is that our students will realize that writing takes time, patience and planning.  For the literacy narrative assignment, I chose to write an essay describing a key reading or writing experience with reflective commentary on the significance of this experience to me.  I approached the assignment in several ways.

First, I had to narrow my topic to a specific writing experience that was meaningful to me.  This first step in the process was a challenge to me, and I tried several different brainstorming strategies to focus my topic on one particular worthwhile event.  I like to free write so I began to write about different writing events that might make a compelling literacy narrative. 

Yet, as a middle aged man, I struggled with this assignment at first.  It took me several drafts before I got my bearings on the topic.  I attribute this difficulty to my inability to focus on one particular event.  I feel like there are a confluence of several events that have influenced my experience with reading and writing.  I came up with several ideas, and it seemed as if I did a complete inventory of every memorable experience that I had with reading and writing.  There was the idea about writing about the first time I received a byline for a feature article I had written in a national magazine.  There were several literacy events during my childhood that I had thought might make an interesting narrative.  In fact, I am not even sure if I have ever written a literacy narrative.  I am not even sure if I have ever written a literacy narrative. 

One thing for sure: I felt like a basic writer might feel when they are given an assignment, and they do not where to start and have no ideas about how to approach the assignment.  One of the things I discovered from this assignment is that everyone is a basic writer at some point in their life. 

However, over the years, I have been inspired by several of the literacy narratives that I have read or taught in my first-year composition courses.   There is little that I could ever write that could compare to the literacy narratives that writers such as Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Alexie Sherman, and Sandra Cisneros have shared with their readers.  Each of their narratives, in their own way, makes some kind of emotional appeal (pathos).  Each author is willing to be vulnerable, in that they are willing to show that weak language and literacy skills give them less control of their world.  In my view, one of the best things about literacy narratives is its ability to share an individual’s unique and very personal relationship with language and literacy. 

For me, my experiences with literacy have been rather non-eventful when compared to these writers.  One of my favorite short stories is "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and me" by Sherman Alexie. "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me" explains Alexie's life as an Indian boy and how writing and reading shaped his life into what it is today. This short essay talks about how he first learned how to read, his intelligence as a young Indian boy, and Alexie as an adult teaching creative writing to Indian kids.  In fact, Alexie says about his relationship with literacy, “I was trying to save my life.”

After coming up with a specific topic, I was able to move to the next step in the writing process: composing.  I wrote three drafts for this assignment.   For my first draft, I participated in a peer review group exercise; I received feedback from three colleagues in my basic writing graduate course.  Their feedback was helpful and constructive, for it gave me an audience’s perspective on my narrative.  For example, in my first draft, I had mentioned several literacy events, but I did not explain how these events fit into the overall theme of my narrative.  For the other two drafts, Professor Gleason, gave me feedback. 

Once I got input on my drafts, I revised my literacy narrative to incorporate some of the changes that were suggested.  After I made the changes, I let the essay sit for a day and went back over it to see if I wanted to make any more changes to the final draft.  When I decided that I did not need to change anything, I proofread and edited the paper for spelling, usage and grammar, and proper MLA style formatting.