English 1010

Assignment #1: Literacy Autobiography

Length: 750 words (three pages)

Due: Friday, May 7, in-class.





The purpose of this assignment is for you to reflect upon and analyze your own literacy narrative, the story of your encounters with writing and language up to this point. It is also an opportunity to compare and contrast your experiences with the information found in chapters 1 and 2 of our text, the Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing. You may wish to answer some of the following questions, using specific examples from the text, and the text of your life.

• You may invent one event or example, but it must be plausible, convincing and you must tell us in a footnote at the end of the paper which anecdote you invented.
  
  
  
  
• You should use specific examples of “literacy events,” moments of writing, reading and learning that have somehow affected your literacy practices
  
  
  
  
• You can answer questions such as:
  
  
  
  o What is your relationship with writing?
  
  o What are your earliest memories of the written word
  
  o What are your favorite/least favorite types of writing. Of reading?
  
  o What classes, if any, have influenced your writing methods? How?
  
  o What kinds of informal writing do you employ on a regular basis?
  
  o What are ways in which you avoid writing?
  
  o Who is your ideal reader, and why?
  
  
  
  
• What counts as literacy? What doesn’t? Who decides?
  
  
• Does your experience as a writer correspond with the descriptions of writing in our textbook?
  
  
• You may write in either a closed or open format.
  
  

Discuss the assignment here.