write a essay

Our
first essay is rather simple. It asks the question “What impact has
reading had on your life?” Please reflect on this question for a few
minutes and then post a short essay in the MLA format. If you have any
questions, please let me know by email. Here is the full-page
description of the assignment:

Essay #1: Literacy Narrative

Write a short literacy narrative about yourself. Literacy narratives
can often have slightly different focuses, so you have a small amount
of room for creativity, but they primarily deal with detailing a
person’s path to reading and writing (education and experiences as a
reader) and/or the impact that reading and writing has on their lives.
Keep in mind that the focus here is on “literacy” (the act of reading
and/or writing) and not as much on “literature” (which we’ll be talking
about in class). Your literacy narrative can involve your experiences
with various “great” books, but it will more likely encompass your
experiences with a variety of texts, from internet reading, to newspapers, to comic books, to whatever you tend to read or even write in your spare time.

The organization of your paper will depend on the focus you want the
essay to take. If you are writing about your experience becoming
literate (learning to read and write), you will probably take a
narrative approach, detailing your first experiences in school or your
first memories of books or the first time reading or writing seemed to
make a big impact on your life. In writing from this perspective, you
will want a clear introduction that establishes the story you plan on
telling, strong transitions and paragraphs (probably chronologically
organized) that put that overall story together, and a conclusion that
goes beyond simple summary to address the large context of what you’ve just written about. What ultimate impact did those early experiences have on the reader/writer you are today?

If you focus more on particular texts or experiences of reading and
writing and how they have impacted your life, you would structure your
essay in a more subject-by-subject fashion. Your introduction would
establish that you are writing about significant moments where literacy
or particular texts impacted your life and give a sense of why those
moments or texts are important. Your body paragraphs would be organized
around each of those texts or moments, explaining what they were and
narrating why they mattered. In this structure, your conclusion would
again go beyond simple summary to put the discussion in a larger
context. Have those particular moments or texts changed the way you
read or address writing now? How might those experiences be similar to
or different from those of other individuals?

Regardless of how you organize the paper, the final draft of your
paper needs to be typed, double spaced, and in 12 point font with one
inch margins. Your name, the instructor’s name, the course number, and
date need to be in the upper left hand corner of the first page (only).
Your last name and the page number should appear in the upper right
hand corner of each page–or simply the page number–either will work,
in other words the full MLA format. You will submit this as a word doc,
PDF, or Richtext file only. If I can not open what you send, I will let
you know and give you plenty of time to resubmit.