School work is highly personal in that it is your own words. What you say comes from your life, is written in your own voice. Academic is involved, because it is what you base your voice off of. Academic learning has taught you how to express yourself, and in that way it is a scaffolding for your personal voice and thinking when constructing a piece of writing. Your personal experience and knowledge will always influence what you write, but your education forms the ways in which you structure your writings.

This collage combines the four most important aspects of my journey in literacy. The phonics books represent the same books that my mother used to teach me and my brother the basics of learning while we were very young. This is an important part of my literacy because I still remember learning from those books, and hating to do it the entire time. I credit my success in my English classes throughout public school to these books, because they gave me the leg up that I needed to succeed. The second photo is the classroom. This is where I learned most of my writing skills, and where I learned to perfect my voice through the writing of countless essays. While I did not find the classroom very interesting, it helped me to become as literate as I am today. The third photo, the novel, is what I find to be most important. Reading for recreation is what allowed me to become a fluent reader, and helped significantly in my writing, as it expanded my vocabulary and subconsciously taught me how to write proper sentences, keep consistent tone, spell words correctly, distinguish between homophones, and many other important parts of writing. In addition to this, reading is what I have always found most enjoyable about English. I won’t lie, I like reading books that entertain me, not ones that challenge me. I often get bored of reading and give many books up, but I can also become completely immersed in a novel, and read through it very quickly. Finally, the paper and pencil represent the countless papers that I have written. Over the course of my years in K-12 I have written more papers than I can recall. Each of these papers have allowed me to experiment and develop my voice, and I contribute that practice to my competence in the English language today.

Works Cited

“Jolly Phonics – Activity Books.” Photograph. Rainbow Resource. Rainbow Resource. n.d. Web. 26 July 2016.

“Classroom.” Photograph. Wikipedia. Wikipedia. n.d. Web 26. July 2016.

“Novel.” Photograph. Pixabay. Pixabay. n.d. Web. 26 July 2016.

“Pencil & Paper.” God, Money, & Me. God, Money, & Me. n.d. Web. 26 July 2016.

Help Recieved

befunky.com – Collage Maker

My journey in literature is pretty straightforward. I started to learn how to read at home, before I started preschool using phonic books and reading picture books. I also learned how to spell very few basic words before going to preschool. In preschool I learned how to write the alphabet and about English mechanics such as punctuation and capital and lower case letters. I was reading short novels for recreation by the time that I was in 1st grade. I liked novels about animals, like Redwood Abbey and I spent a lot of time reading because I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of television, so if I wasn’t playing outside I was reading. I have always done fairly well in my English classes. The only B I’ve ever gotten in an English class was Literature & Composition AP in 12th grade. There aren’t any standout moments in my life when it comes to learning how to read or write. I have never had a hard time with English, but I never found it particularly rewarding either. Overall, it is a subject that I have to work hard to do well in, but never so hard that it is stressful for me. ERH 101 has been pretty much on par with the difficulty that Literature and Composition presented for me. It took me an adjustment period to get used to the type of writing that is required of me in this class, and I know the effort that I need to put in to get what I consider to be a satisfactory grade. I had a hard time with explicitly stating my thinking, instead of implying it, but now I feel confident in that area. I still have a hard time with picking which parts of my primary source to analyze. I either feel like I have too much information, or too little, and I often find myself questioning if what I chose to analyze is relevant to my thesis. Overall, this class challenges me, but I feel confident that I can get a decent grade with the right amount of effort and collaboration with other students.

I lived my early life in a much more rural setting than where I have spent the last ten years of my life. When I moved from a small horse farm in Culpeper to a much more urbanized/suburban area I lost some of my culture. I had somewhat of an accent from going to Culpeper public schools, which I quickly lost after we moved. I also had to relearn most of what I had learned in preschool through second grade because I had learned too much in certain subjects, and not enough in others. I also learned that in my new schools with larger student populations I could get away with more, and I learned where effort was required to get an “A”, and where it wasn’t. Overall, I just became a much more relaxed student, but I still retained the value that I held for manual labor and being self sufficient.

ERH 101-03 Project 3

ERH 101-03 Project 3 Presentation

I was advised to focus more on the different types of media linked to the Facebook page that I discussed in order to better analyze the ways the page appeals to both novice and experts members of the community.

ERH 101-03 Project 3

In the two sample essays that we were provided, I found that the most prominent difference between those works and my own was the strength of the thesis. Mine was certainly forceful, but it was not as narrow as the ones in the assigned papers. Also one of the assigned papers made use of footnotes, which my paper may have benefited from, although I was not looking for a reason to use footnotes, because I have never used them in my writing before. Another large difference was the smooth integration of rhetorical theory. I made rhetorical theory the subject of most of my body paragraphs, rather than as added support for the support I should have been providing to the argument of my thesis through my body paragraphs. Overall, the papers that were provided were generally more adept in the integration of evidence into the paper’s main argument in such a way as to prevent summarizing.

For my primary text on the upcoming essay I am using the Association for Computing Machinery website. The website has several unwritten rules for writing. The website uses a formal tone, as can be seen through its use of formal grammar and complete sentences rather than short descriptions. The writing is highly technical, as it uses several acronyms without describing what the acronyms stand for. Finally, the writing is divided into categories allowing the reader to find the information that they are looking for through short titles and descriptions, leading to an article which expounds upon these descriptions.

The website connects itself to the computer science discourse community by covering topics that relate to the essential to the goals of the community. This is similar to the article that I took from the ACM’s scholarly journal, but is is slightly different because of the digital. Because of the easier navigation offered by the website readers can transfer easier between subjects, so titles are designed to draw readers’ attention, and articles focus more on the most interesting aspects of a story, rather than the more mundane. Readers are also able to be quickly redirected to related articles, which allows the readers to gain a better understanding of their original reading, or it helps them to better understand the impact of other readings. This asserts slightly different connections, by the way it makes the source more of an encyclopedia rather than a news source.