Pre-Writing and Brainstorming for Essay I

Pre-Writing and Brainstorming for Essay I Literacy narratives provide a space for writers to examine their literacy experiences as critical acts of inquiry. Instead of thinking about literacy learning as body of knowledge that is “out there” to be acquired from “experts” or as simply the mastery of grammar rules, think about literacy as fluid and changing. Individuals tend to have many misconceptions about reading and writing. These “literacy myths” can be detrimental to one’s progress in many ways. Check out this short article which provides a few examples of common literacy myths: http://www.aims.edu/student/online-writing-lab/overview/myths For a more in-depth discussion of literacy myths, including misconceptions we may have about how writing is learned or who is able to teach writing, I also suggest you look through this essay: http://www.csudh.edu/ccauthen/575S12/Smith.pdf As you go through this packet and brainstorm, think about the literacy myths that you’ve wrestled with throughout your life, and envision the potential and possibility for literacy development—ways to move beyond those myths. Your literacy is not static event or a “time I became literate.” Your experiences with reading, writing, communicating, thinking, and learning to “read” the world around you are ongoing as you encounter new situations and contexts in which to do so. You are an active participant in your continuous literacy development, and by reflecting on your own role as well as the many outside factors that facilitate this continuous development, you should begin to develop an awareness of your literacies in flux, literacy as knowledge- making practices, and literacy linked to change in your life and in your community.

Try to go through and answer as many of these questions as you can. You will find that you may have more to say for some of the questions than you do for others. That’s okay. You may also find that some questions may not be directly applicable to your personal experience. That’s also okay. Just skip that question and move to the next. There is a wide-range of questions here designed to provoke a lot of digging and critical inquiry. Write answers to these questions in any format—list, bullet point, concept map, phrases— that makes it possible for you to dig into your past. Try to be as thoughtful, thorough, and specific as possible. Working hard on this will greatly improve your potential for developing a good idea for your essay, and as always, the first step to a good essay is a good idea.

1. What are some of the early encounters you remember with language (written or verbal)? Why do you think you remember them? 2. Think of a time you were proud or embarrassed by your ability to communicate. Why? Who was involved?

3. Did you ever say or write something and later wished you hadn’t? Explain the circumstances and the outcome.

4. Has there ever been a sense of reward or punishment associated with reading or writing from your past?

5. Who is the storyteller in your family? Relate a story frequently told. How has that person/story influenced you? What role does storytelling play in your life?

6. What are some of the rules of language/communication/writing that you have learned? How have they been helpful or harmful? Who taught them to you?

7. What literacy myths haunt you or have haunted you in the past? How have these misconceptions affected your attitude toward reading and writing or shaped how you think about yourself as a student or as writer?

8. Who has helped shape you as the speaker, reader, or writer that you are today?

9. What is your current attitude about reading and writing? Explore the origins of this attitude. What events and experiences may have shaped the way you think about reading and writing?

10. Writing has the potential to enact change. Think of a time when language (written or spoken) got you something you wanted. How did you accomplish this task? What did you learn? Or think about your “literacy in action”—how might your future writing tasks have the potential to enact change?

11. What has someone written to you that you treasure? What have you ever written to someone that the receiver kept as a treasure?

12. Do you consider your literacy skills better/worse than those of others? Whose? Why?

13. Have you ever used your literacy to judge somebody in a negative way? How? Why? Was it a conscious decision?

14. How has learning to read and write in a second or third language been different from your first-language literacy development? What different meaning do these literacies carry for you?

15. What recent challenges have you encountered with reading and writing? Have you overcome these challenges? What have you learned as a result?

16. What values do you associate with reading and writing? How did you come to identify certain values with reading and writing? 17. What moments from your past do you remember as particularly empowering or dis- empowering?

18. How has your personal literacy history shaped your professional goals?

19. How is reading and writing portrayed in films and stories about young people?

20. Aside from the conventional outlets (school/education/parents), what other cultural/social/political/historical aspects do you see as influencing and shaping your literacy? How so? Why? Thinking beyond traditional literacy A discourse community is a group of communicators with a common goal or interest that adopts certain preferred ways of participating in public discussion. These preferred ways of discussion are called discursive practices. Generally, these discursive practices involve various genres (academic papers, books, lectures, debates, TV and radio programming, etc.) and require the mastery of certain special terminology or jargon. Generally, "membership" in a discourse community requires a certain level of expertise in the common goal; the more "expert" one is considered, the more influence one has over the preferred discursive practices. The boundaries of discourse communities are often hazy, and frequently overlap, and many broad discourse communities have smaller, more specialized sub- communities. Most people participate regularly in several different discourse communities. Participating in a discourse community requires individuals to develop a type of literacy—a competence or knowledge in a specified area. Different discourse communities have different literacy expectations. Here are some examples:

 Video gamers (of a particular game or in general).  Fans (of a type of music, a band, a book, a movie, a television show, etc.)  Institutions (The Armed Forces, prison, university / school) 1. What discourse communities do you belong to? 2. Identify one discourse community in which you are most engaged in. What discursive practices did you need to learn or adopt in order to participate in this discourse community? How did you learn these practices? What common goals or interests do you share with others in this community? What genres of communication are most common in this community? 3. Have you ever felt like you struggled to fit in with a specific discourse community because you were unfamiliar with the discursive practices or jargon of that community? 4. Have you ever been in a situation when you found yourself bothered, irritated, frustrated, or angry because a person attempted to join your discourse community? Why were you bothered? How did you react? Why did you react this way? 5. Have you encountered an individual who lacked the discursive practices or disregarded the conventions or values associated with your discourse community? How did you treat this person? Why? 6. Explore the differences between the language you speak at home and the languages you use with friends, teachers, and employers. Have you ever struggled to transition from one language to the next? When you are forced to do so, do you ever feel like you are performing—like you are being untrue to who you are? 7. As illustrated by Felsenfeld’s essay “Rebel Music,” there are many literacies that people develop in life. What other literacies have you developed in your life or are you currently in the process of developing? Moving from Brainstorming to Invention Once you have generated material to write about, it’s time to start thinking about how to organize it and what direction you want to pursue in your essay. Your literacy narrative will not (and cannot) cover all of the ideas that you’ve generated by brainstorming and working through these questions. So, it’s time to sort through your prewriting material, find the events and people that feel most significant to you, and identify some patterns and common themes/threads. 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 and what doesn’t work in literacy education, on the basis of your experience. It might be a resolution to do things differently or to keep doing something that has been working. It might be a description of an ongoing tension or conflict you experience when you read and write—or the story of how you resolved such a conflict earlier in your literacy history.

Or it could be a lot of other things. You could: Tell the story of your development from your earliest memories to later ones with the goal of explaining where your current attitudes about reading and writing came from. Along the way, highlight the most significant turning points of your history. Choose materials from your pre-writing that reveal the role that a person or type of person played in your literacy development. Focus on one specific incident or encounter that is especially rich and important and use that event to craft your entire narrative.

There are so many possibilities here, and you are at liberty to choose the focus and the approach that works best for you to successfully fulfill the requirements for Essay I. The next step of this process in to move on to Invention Exercise I.