Purpose
This assignment asks you to write about your literacy history, habits, and processes in order to
help you understand yourself better as a reader and writer. Remember, literacy is not limited to
reading and writing but involves technology, discourse, access, sponsorship, and culture. You
can have more than one literacy. Becoming aware of your literacy practices will help you
improve your writing and learning.
 

Description
A narrative is a story. To compose your literacy narrative, you will draw upon those stories,
anecdotes, memories, experiences, readings, or other events and descriptions that allow you to
offer readers the most vivid, interesting, and insightful explanations you can about yourself as a
writer and reader. Downs and Wardle (authors of WaW), recommend you, “consider what all
these memories and experiences suggest, you should be looking for an overall ‘so what?’––a
main theme, a central ‘finding,’ an overall conclusion that your consideration leads you to draw.”
Calling upon the material you generated in reading responses, in-class writing, and
brainstorming, identify the “so what?,” or main point, you want your literacy narrative to
convey. You then can use the experiences, ideas, and insights from that material to explain and
support the main point you want to make about your own literacy.
There is no formula or template for this writing task. Because you are the subject of your
literacy narrative, writing it in first-person makes sense.
What Makes It Effective?
An effective literacy narrative essay will do the following:
? tell a story or stories about your literacy history
? identify where you are now as a writer and reader and explain how your past has shaped
your present
? make some overall point [“so what?”] about your literacy experiences
? Reflect on the readings from this unit (not necessarily referencing them explicitly)