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Hannah Sharpless Professor Jan Rieman English 1103 Due September 18, 2012 I actually really like my paper. I feel it could be a bit lengthier but my video at the end is a reading of a two page paper so it adds to the length. I felt that if I added too much more to it, the paper would become repetitive and actually take away from its content. I thought this paper was going to be extremely difficult to write but it all came to me very quickly. It was a great prompt and writing it was so painful, as it usually is for me. I appreciated all the prior things weve done for this paper that adds relevant content, making it much easier to write and understand. I often find myself lost in writing and being unable to find the right words but again, this paper was much easier to compose. Im interested to hear what you have to say because my peer editors didnt have much constructive criticism for me. With grammar, I often struggle with overusing commas so that would be one thing I would like for you to focus on. One more thing I would love detailed reflection on would be my video. Although youve already read that piece Im interested to know how you reacted to it while it was in a different form. I would like to know if you think it was a good idea to include that or if more writing wouldve been a better way to add to the piece.

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My Life in Literacy We use reading and writing every single day. There are several different factors that affect the way we operate as readers and writers, such as personal experiences, culture, and knowledge. Growing up in America, I was taught to use Standard English in school. I focused strongly on sentence structure and grammar because we as a society place much emphasis on these things. In Teaching Standard English: But Whose Standard? By Linda Christensen, she speaks on how students words became devalued when more attention is placed on the way something is written rather than what is said. I completely agree with her opinion because while we are taught to focus so heavily on grammar and structure to earn a respectable grade, we often take away the substance in our writing. In my own experiences, reading and writing was never enjoyable when it had to be done a certain way. School and teachers have greatly impacted the way I view reading and writing. When I was very young and just learned how to read, it was very pleasurable for me. It was new and exciting and I became good at it quickly. When I reached third grade and was introduced to a program called Accelerated Reading, or AR books, I experienced a steady depreciation for literature. In this program, I was forced to read books of only a certain type and was to report on them weekly. The initial freedom and exhilaration I had for reading vanished. Ever since then, I never found reading and writing for curriculum enjoyable. My life outside of school has also greatly impacted journey with reading and writing. It was hard for me to find ways to make literature enjoyable again. My mom would make us do programs through the library where we would earn prizes in order to encourage us to read. Despite the rewards, this didnt make me any more engaged in reading because I wasnt doing it

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by choice. That was the key, I needed to find something that allowed me to interact with the literature and really engage in it. I got into cooking. When I was very young I used to walk down to my neighbors home and pick fruits and vegetables with her in her garden. We would go inside and I would watch her closely wash, cut, and cook countless amazing dishes with all these foods. She allowed me to become involved. I would read with her the recipes and interact with all of these different foods. In cooking, it is extremely important to follow the steps of the recipe very closely in order to get optimal results. This caused me to become a better reader in the sense of paying attention to each word in the text and understanding it before moving on to the next section. I quickly learned that once I was able to become involved in what I was reading, it became much more enjoyable and easier for me to do. Reading is a part of almost everything you do in some way or another, so finding things I enjoyed and connecting it to reading was a lot easier for me than being forced to read and finding ways to enjoy it. In our reading response to Cecchinis and Perezs Motivation in Literacy Development, we discussed how four different categories affect your literacy development. Family role models are one of those categories, and have been a significant factor in my literacy development. In my home, education was greatly stressed by my parents. Both of them grew up in homes where education was highly important so it was certain they were going to push the same for us kids. This pushed me harder in school to obtain greater knowledge and really strive to achieve excellence. This impacted the way I read and wrote in school at a young age because even though I wasnt enjoying it, I knew if I didnt succeed and put my best effort into it I was going to disappoint my parents. My dads mother was a teacher so there was even the pressure of not

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upsetting my extended family with my lack of effort of poor grades. I became a good reader and writer because of this but I still needed them to help me find ways to enjoy these two things. My father was a pastor while I was growing up, and his father a reverend. Church and our faith with Jesus were two highly stressed things in our home because of this. I came to know the Lord since before I can remember and being so closely involved in the church made this easier but also added pressure to gain more knowledge. There were several kids at our church and each Sunday we would get together for what we called childrens church to study the Bible and the importance of the Lord. I came to find that many of the kids knew much more than I did about the Bible, which embarrassed me because as the preachers daughter, I felt I was held to a higher standard. This motivated me to want to know more. Many of the people in our church knew I loved to read as a very young child so even as I grew out of it, they continued to buy me several books and devotionals that I could read in my down time. I went back to these and read every single one of them. I would read them nightly, and learned how much I enjoyed reading about Christianity and the life of Jesus. I became excited once again because I found something else that engaged me in the text to make me enjoy literature. I would bring my childrens Bibles to school and read them during quiet time. One day in third grade I was reading a story book of Daniel and the lions den. I was told to put this story away and find a book with a blue dot on the back of it and to never bring a book like this back to class again. To this day that moment makes me emotional because something I found so important was shot down by my own teacher, who was supposed to develop my reading. My parents were appalled by the actions of my teacher but there was nothing they could do about it besides encourage me to do more reading and try writing with the text at home. As I got older I began to keep journals with records of my favorite verses and

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meanings of Gods words. This really developed my literacy skills because I finally found something that bonded both reading and writing skills with something I enjoyed. My granddad and I would always read together every time we saw each other. We were extremely close and with him being a reverend, he was a great source for me to better my understanding of the Bible. I would go listen to him preach at church on Sundays when I was in his town and sit in awe at the way he spoke and presented his word. It wasnt that he was incredibly articulate or highly educated sounding, it was the delivery of his thoughts and the substance of what he was presenting that kept his audience engaged. I connected this with my own writing. Despite being taught that the only way to keep your reader engaged was through correct grammar or sentence structure, my granddad, my favorite person in the world, taught me that none of that mattered. With all of this, is when reading and writing began to change for me. I realized what it meant to me and I was going to develop and express myself in a better way. For a WTE I wrote on the topic of my most memorable reading and/or writing experience, I chose to write about reading with my granddad for the last time. This was highly emotional for me because not only did I lose the dearest person to me, I lost a favorite pastime that brought me to enjoy reading and writing. I chose to include that WTE in this essay in the form of a video because I feel it directly relates to this current topic and was a key part of my literacy memoir. The reason I chose to do this in video form was to try something a little different and engaging. I want you as the reader to feel the emotion as you witness it rather than having to simply imagine it as you would read a text. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLU4KAUgce0&feature=youtu.be

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