The document is a literacy narrative that recounts the author's journey of learning to read and write, beginning with early encouragement from their siblings and facing challenges, such as skepticism from a librarian. It highlights pivotal moments that shaped their relationship with literacy, including the struggle to complete an apology letter for cheating, ultimately fostering a deeper appreciation for reading and writing. The narrative aims to reflect on personal growth and the lasting impact of these experiences on the author's approach to literacy.

1. Example 1
Student Example
Professor C.N. Myers
English 1010-E01
5 May 2009
Don’t Ever Let Someone Tell You That You Can’t Do
Something:
A Literacy Narrative
I will never forget learning how to read and write for the very
first time. I used to closely
watch my sister do her work for college. Then, I would
innocently sit by her and read a book to
mimic her. This memory immediately comes to my head when I
think about how I learned to
read. I remember my sister getting me ready for a bath on one
warm summer night before my
first day of kindergarten. I told her how excited I was for the
next day and asked her, “Will I
learn how to read and count?” She replied with “Yes, you’re

2. going to learn your ABCs and your
123s and everything else.” I went onto to ask her, “But what are
ABCs?” She said, “You’ll find
out.” Then, I washed up quickly and continued to get ready for
the next day.
Ever since that first day, I would annoyingly show my sister my
books and worksheets
and ask her about every word I couldn’t pronounce. She would
tell me to just sound them out
instead of telling me every one of them. So I did exactly that. I
would patiently sit there every
day and analyze words that I couldn’t say. I broke them down
word by word, never giving up. I
would divide the words up by their letters as if they were math
problems. I built word upon word
every day. I was fascinated by books series such as Arthur and
The Bernstein Bears. I loved
everything about them from the way they felt in my hand to the
world that they took me into just
by reading. I also mimicked my brother when he did his
reading for school. I loved being
around my siblings and doing everything they did, no matter
what it was. So while they were

3. Example 2
reading to accomplish goals in school, my earliest recollections
of reading and writing were
simply for the enjoyment of being closer to the people I loved
the most.
As I went through elementary school, I always especially
enjoyed reading books and
writing. I used to read books such as Dav Pilkey’s Captain
Underpants and Jeff Kinney’s Diary
of a Wimpy Kid. I would read the books then rewrite my own
version of a certain chapter
because I thought my version would be more interesting and
whimsical. I had composition
books full of my imaginative writings. They also had different
cartoon sketches I would make
up. Those books were amazingly colorful due to the fact that I
wrote mostly with colored
pencils. I spent months upon months perfecting those
composition notebooks that I called books.
Page by page, I would fill them up. I remember also asking my
friends for help along the way.
They weren’t as interesting; in fact, they may have thought it
was a little silly for me to actually

4. think my writings were real books. I remember days where I
used to get in trouble for writing
those things in school without permission. Books that I read
through elementary school
fascinated me so much that I would carry them around with me
all day to read whenever I had
free time and also to write my different versions to the books. I
remember being required to
check books out once a week in elementary school and how
overwhelmed I was by the selection;
frankly if it was not a requirement at all, I would’ve still done
it. It would take me an extensive
amount of time to actually check my book out because I never
knew what to choose.
Unfortunately, we could only check out two at a time.
Along with those positive memories of reading early on in my
life, there were also not so
positive memories. There was one specific time where one day
we paid a visit to the library as
we normally did once a week. We usually were told to only
pick books from a certain section of
books where I guess those were easier. I decided to venture off
into the other sections of the

5. Example 3
library because I was uninterested in the books we always had
to choose from. I scrambled
through the books until I finally found one that I wanted. It was
a biography about Martin
Luther King, Jr., which was clearly written for kids because it
included vivid pictures. For the
life of me, I can’t remember the name of it. I was really
interested in the civil rights movement,
even at that young of an age. I took the book up to the checkout
station and the librarian
immediately said with attitude, “You cannot read!” I replied
with shock, “Yes, I can.” I was
appalled by this because I didn’t understand why I was doubted.
I felt as I was being stripped of
my chance to expand my literacy skills. I hated that the school
system was trying to make me
into someone who waited for instructions to expand my reading
rather than doing it on my own.
This wasn’t even the worst part. The librarian then said, “If
you can read me the entire first
page, then I will let you check it out.” I stumbled through it, but

6. I completed the first page and
was able to check it out. By her attitude with checking my book
out, I think she felt the
satisfaction of knowing she was right; I couldn’t read the whole
thing at that point.
When I got home, I told my mother the entire story. She then
gave me words of
encouragement that would always stick with me and would
come to me any time I had to read
and write. My mother told me, “Don’t ever let someone tell you
that you can’t do something.”
It is a simple statement, but it was very powerful and definitely
something I hadn’t heard before.
That motivated me, and by the end of the day, I had researched
how to say every single word in
that book. I proudly read it aloud to my entire family as they
listened to me cheerfully. With
that, the situation died down, but it always stayed in the back of
my brain every week when I
stepped into the library.
I can remember a time in 6th grade where I got in a great deal
of trouble at school because
I was caught cheating on a test. After nervously breaking the
news to my family, they started in

7. Example 4
on me. They took everything I had that entertained a young
boy: my video games, my cell
phone, and my access to television. At that point several
different thoughts were running
through my head. When will I get my things back? Will I ever
have fun again? All of these
questions were answered a day or so after the incident. My
parents, who were still furious at me,
told me that the only way I would be able to get my things back
within the next week was if I
wrote a two-page letter of apology to them, my teacher, and to
the principal of the school. That
idea was insane to me, and frankly I didn’t think that it was
possible for me to do it. Then again,
I wanted my things back and I wanted my life to return back
normal, so I had no choice. After
minutes of debating and trying to come up with a simpler way, I
decided to go ahead and roll
with it. Surprisingly, my parents rejected my first attempt. My
dad scolded me saying, “Do it

8. Over! It doesn’t flow.” The next time I decided to start on it, it
took me three whole days to
complete it. My dad was astonished that I was able to grow my
work in such a short period of
time. After that, I showed my teacher, and he was just as
surprised. After accepting my
apology, he even assigned that as a regular punishment if one of
the classroom rules were
broken, pretty much all because of me.
What I learned about literacy through my young years put me on
a wonderful path for
how I approach literacy now. I approach it now not as
something that is forcefully thrown at me
because of school curriculum, but as something that will
advance my mind, body, and soul for
years to come. I came to understand that even though literacy
may not be something that I
would like to make a career out of, it will indeed carry me out
through life. Literacy ties into
every second of the real world, no matter what path you are on
or what field you are in.

9. Example 5
Works Cited
Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” Writing about
Writing: A College Reader. ed. 2. Ed.
Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St.
Martins, 2014. 43-62. Print.
Brown, Marc. Arthur. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
Print
Stan and Jan Berenstain. The Berenstain Bears. New York:
Random House, 1980. Print
Pilkey, Dav. Captain Underpants. New York: Scholastic, 1997.
Print
Kinney, Jeff. Diary of a Wimpy Kid. New York: Amulet Books,
2007. Print
Purpose
The purpose of this assignment––which requires you to write
about your literacy (i.e., reading and writing) history, habits,
and processes––is to help you understand yourself better as a
reader and writer. Fuller awareness of your literacy practices

10. can help you develop greater control over them and your
learning.
Description
A common definition for “narrative” is that it is a written
account of linked events. In other words, a narrative is a story.
To compose your literacy narrative, you will draw upon those
stories, anecdotes, memories, experiences, readings, and 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.
Getting Started
Invention Many of the responses to the assigned readings and
in-class writing prompts can contribute to material you may
choose to use in your literacy narrative essay. Our course
textbook also offers the following questions (some of which you
likely have already discussed or written about) as a means of
encouraging you to “mine your memory, thinking carefully
about where you’ve been and where you are as a reader and
writer” (206):
• How did you learn to write and/or read?
• What kinds of writing/reading have you done in the past?
• How much have you enjoyed the various kinds of
writing/reading you’ve done?
• What are particularly vivid memories that you have of
reading, writing, or activities that involved them?
• What is your earliest memory of reading? Your earliest
memory of writing?
• What sense did you get, as you were learning to read or write,
of the value of reading and writing, and where did that sense
come from?
• What frustrated you about reading or writing as you were
learning and then as you progressed through school? By the
same token, what pleased you?

11. • What kind of writing/reading do you do most commonly?
• What are your current attitudes, feelings, or stances toward
reading and writing?
• Where do you think your feelings about and habits of writing
and reading come from?
How did you get to where you are as a writer/reader?
What in your past has made you the kind of writer/reader you
are today?
• Who are some people in your life who have acted as literacy
sponsors?
• What are some institutions and experiences in your life that
have acted as literacy sponsors?
• What have any of the readings in this chapter reminded you
about from your past or present as a reader and writer?
Analyzing Your Material
The writers’ of our textbook offer an essential
recommendation:
As 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. It might be an insight about
why you read and write as you do today based on past
experience. It might be an argument about what works or what
doesn’t work in literacy education, on the basis of your
experience . . . . It might be a description of an ongoing conflict
or tension you experience when you read and write––or the
story of how you resolved such a conflict earlier in your literacy
history. (It could also be a lot of other things [emphasis
added].) (207)
Planning and Drafting
Calling upon the material you generated through reading
responses, in-class writing, and brainstorming, identify the “So
what?,” or main point, you want your literacy narrative to

12. 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. As the authors of our
textbook point out, “Because your literacy narrative tells the
particular story of a particular person––you––its shape will
depend on the particular experiences you’ve had and the
importance you attach to them. Therefore, it’s difficult to
suggest a single structure for the literacy narrative that will
work for all writers. The structure that you use should support
your particular intention and content” (207). Thus, there is no
formula ortemplate for this writing task. Because you are the
subject of your literacy narrative, writing it in first-person
makes sense. As you draft your essay, it might be helpful to ask
yourself the following questions:
• Should I focus on one pivotal event, or should I include an
array of related events?
• Should I put events in chronological order, or would a
different order be more interesting?
• Should I use dialogue, descriptive imagery, and other
narrative strategies to tell the story (or stories) I want to?
• Where should I summarize and where should I go into detail?
• What course readings (or lines from poetry or song lyrics or
other creative works) can I quote or refer to that help me make
an important point?
• Should I begin my narrative with a traditional essay
introduction, or should I begin in medias res?
What Makes It Effective?
As the authors of our textbook also point out, the literacy
narrative essay assignment “asks you to carefully think about
your history as a reader and writer” (207). Furthermore, 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?”]

13. about your literacy experiences The authors add: “The strongest
literacy narratives will incorporate ideas and concepts from the
readings in this unit to help frame and explain your
experiences” (207). As will be true of all the writing you submit
for evaluation in this course, your “essay should also be clear,
organized, interesting, and well-edited” (207). Final drafts
should be at least 1500 words. Be sure to include an interesting
title, too. DUE DATES