Literacy is a powerful thing in the world that is necessary for almost every human being.
The ability to read and write is influenced by many things in someone’s life. The key to literacy is reading development and a progression in skills. The key to my literacy improvement was an influence of many things over the course of my life that made me truly consider how I interpret my own literacy. These are the reasons why I read and write the way I do. Throughout my lifetime, I’ve had experienced many things that have helped me to realize the power of language.
English is my favorite subject. My mother had a strong belief in proper English. Those beliefs influenced the way I read and write. My favorite kind of writing is biographies. I enjoy seeing and understanding things from someone else’s point of view. This has influenced my writing by allowing me to understand different thought processes. It helps me to think outside the box when reading, and even writing. My parents allowed me to read and watch a lot of things that interested me. Those things included many scary movies. For some odd reason, I loved watching zombie and paranormal movies. Those movies had an impact on my writing. Being able to watch scary movies as a young child showed in my writing. It didn’t turn me into a crazy person, it made my writing more creative. For example, after watching a movie such as Snakes on a Plane, I would free write about snakes that ate people and terrorized a plane. I would go in such detail because of watching a movie with so much gore and rawness.
I was read to a lot as a kid, which was another impact on my reading and writing. I remember my mother would always read to me as a child. She specifically read children’s books that had a meaning to them. After reading the book, we would have a discussion about the message of the books that we read together. This did not stop me from “having a normal childhood”, rather I enjoyed it a lot. It allowed me to tell my mom what opinion about what I’m taking in from the books. In kindergarten my teacher read to the class every day. Hearing her distinct voice, helped me every time to pay attention to what she read from the books. The books had many
illustrations, fun rhymes, and wacky sounds. Hearing my teacher ask the class to sound out words like “potato”, always gave me happiness from having to challenge myself, even at such a young age. I have a vivid memory of being in kindergarten and reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are, The Rainbow Fish, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do
You See? The Rainbow Fish, by Marcus Pfister, allowed me to be interactive and engage with the bright colors of the fish. My teacher would make funny sounds for a different character. This helped me memorize the role and what the characters meant in the book. When I write now, I use a similar technique of labeling each key point of what I want to discuss with different attention grabbers. Even something as simple as highlighting important things with different colors is a great technique for when I’m trying to take notes for a paper or write a research paper on a specific topic. That book still resonates with me today because it’s enjoyable when reading things that can catch the reader’s attention.
The next thing that influenced my writing was that moving to different places quite a lot. I never got a base of a set way of writing because I moved around to different schools and neighborhoods. Therefore, with writing, I don’t have a basic technique that I use, which slightly affects me in Writing and Rhetoric class. Never have I had a class specific to Writing and Rhetoric in high school. Not experiencing that class set me back behind my peers. In my experience of changing schools so often, my writing always changed because I was taught different techniques by different teachers. When I was a child I always enjoyed writing and grammar, but I was not prepared by my school for college-level writing. I would say that my school had a big influence on my preparedness for college-level writing. The school reputation was not known for having the most skillful teachers that would get the kids to a higher way of thinking. Taking Honors English in high school never challenged me the way it should have. Even on my tests, including SAT, I got an above average score, I still felt like I wasn’t on the level I should’ve been. I found my stepfather teaching me the proper grammar and how to properly write papers, even after having an Honors English class. After having those non-challenging classes, my writing abilities began to show through my assignments. My stepfather, who is very good with writing, helped me to become nearly the best writer that I could be. Much of my writing skills come from a mixture of my mother’s ability in proper grammar and my stepfathers’ abilities in the skills of wording and formatting. Those high school experiences helped me to realize truly where I stood with my writing.
In my opinion, Literacy is not just the ability to read or write, but the ability to take lemons and make lemonade. My childhood, film, parents, and high school were all different factors for the way that I write to this day. Some of these experiences are good, some bad, but they all have changed me for the better. Not only has literacy helped me in school, but it has helped me to express myself based off experiences mainly from my childhood.
Work Cited
(Wikipedia), (Google Books), (Hobby Lark, Rowland, May 11,2016)