Jordan Sazama

Olivia Stoltman

Literacy Narrative Reflection

English 110

Literacy Narrative Reflection Sazama 1

The intention of this essay was to describe a literacy narrative which had taken place in

my personal life. I decided to talk about the time where I finally started to enjoy reading which

then sparked a movement of literacy in my life. The overall intended audience is to reach to

people who are in the same situation that I was in. It was written to help people understand that if

they are not the best at writing or reading, they are not alone, and they can get through it. When

deciding what to write about on this essay I choose to think about individual parts of my life

where I was most influenced by literacy. I looked at first learning to read, giving my first official

speech and then I finally decided to focus on my struggles with the Spanish novel. I wanted to

choose a topic where I struggled, and I overcame the problems I had in order to show the reader

that even though there are problems in life, you can overcome them. In order to plan for this

essay, I set up a brainstorming tool called a “brain web” where I had a central idea and then

branched certain ideas off of the web. This helped me to set up concrete ideas and topics to cover

in my story. Then I decided to almost free write allowing for mistakes and just keeping my train

of thought going. Moving into peer review I left my rough draft almost as I wrote it so that I

would able to be able to portray my ideas clearly without having to worry about punctuation or

spelling. Then, after peer review is when I started to read my essay out loud to myself and find

the small mistakes I had made along with taking the advice of my peers to correct my essay.

Reading out loud had helped me the most because it forced me to hear what I had wrote and I

could find little mistakes I wouldn’t have found. The comments from my peers also helped me
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greatly in order to find awkward sentences and more fluid transitions in order to link all my ideas

together. I feel like this experience of descriptive writing has greatly helped with my personal

writing. I was able to focus on description which in the past wasn’t one of my main focuses.

From now on in every piece that I write, description will be on my mind and it will help me

increase my overall writing skills greatly.