Literacy Narrative Process

“Hhhmmm, which book should I pick out for mamma to read to me tonight?” I thought to myself and I shuffled books around on my bookshelf.  Wearing my oversized t-shirt, I had to be able to play with my belly-button, and a full belly from dinner I picked out my favorite book Love You Forever and I curled up in bed next to my mom.  She read each page with so much emotion and love and I could definitely feel that through her reading.  “I wonder what it’s going to be like when I am going to be the one reading books,” I pondered to myself as I listened to my mom read those meaningful words.  I wanted to pick out more and more books and just have her read to me all night.  I loved the different messages that all of the books had.  “It’s going to be absolutely amazing being a big girl and reading all of the books that there are out in the world.”  I thought.  I had a big love for reading, and it’s a shame that it would come to an end as I got older. 

This was the excerpt that I picked out to share with the class.  I thought that this was an interesting part of my paper because it tells a story about how my literacy history began.  To me, this writing process was extremely stressful!  When we were doing the notecard assignment in class I was honestly struggling to think of things to write down and I actually randomly wrote things down because I didn't feel as though I had anything else to write.  With my first draft I kind of collected some thoughts together and typed them up as best that I could.  It was in a completely unorganized fashion and I don't think that it made too much sense.  My next draft was a little bit better.  I made some minor changes and got more ideas written down.  I got a little side tracked with the ethnography project and forgot about my literacy narrative and I didn't work on it for a few weeks.  Once the ethnography was done I sat down to work on my narrative and I actually had a completely different mind set about the paper.  I was thinking in ways that I had never thought before and my creative juices were flowing out onto my paper.  I think that the analytical thinking that I had to do in the ethnography actually made my writing process a lot easier for my literacy narrative.  When I was writing my final draft I changed my paper a lot!  I added in some excerpts which Lacy advised me to do.  I made my thoughts more complete and completed my paper as a whole.  In the end, I'm glad that we did this paper because it made me think in different ways and come up with a topic that was all mine and allowed me to go in any direction with it.  I liked being about to revise my work as much as I wanted to and being about to play around with different ideas.