Literacy in My Life When I was young, my parents read to me a lot to help me read better for when I started school. Once I started school I was a pretty good reader but I was not very good with writing. The teachers would make us write all the time, and I thought it was useless. I am not a very good writer because I would choose to do the very least I could do to get by with writing prompts throughout my elementary and middle school years. In high school, I was worried about the writing test before and after I took the test.
I hated the assignments to turn out “compositions”, and went at them like heavy labor.” (Baker, 2nd paragraph, pg. 66) I felt that part of the paragraph just reminded of myself of the same things like in this paragraph. The genre of this essay is a narrative essay because Baker explains his high school and college experiences. When Baker said “I had begun to think of myself as a writer. It was the only thing for which I seemed to have the smallest talent, and silly thought it sounded when I told people I’d like to be a writer, it gave me a way of thinking about myself which satisfied my need to have an
That was a long time ago, almost like two years ago. Writing has been something that I used to love to do way back when I was still in high school. Now, I write only if there needs to be something written, most usually with school assignments. I even feel like my writing skills have rusted and that I do not know anymore how to write passionately. As they say, everything deteriorates if they are no longer used.
What a punishment this paper was, I thought. If I didn’t like writing before I damn sure didn’t now. With the thought of losing recess ever present on my mind, I continued to work on my paper. It was during this time that I started to view writing, not as something fun or a chance to be creative, but as a chore. It was something I was forced to do as a punishment.
When I write a first draft, I attempt to be perfect. Because of this, I get hung up on the little details and end up not able to either finish my work, or not able to properly convey my ideas. Lamott talks in the chapter “Perfectionism” on the last paragraph of page 29 about how perfectionism can be a result of our minds building a barrier from our bad experiences with writing or other issues that may have gone on. She also states “Perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force” (28). Being a good writer is something that I have always wanted to be.
I found the least interest in the wordless books. Since I am a secondary education major, I feel that words are essential for getting a story across and going into depth in teaching a lesson. I do realize that books without words are necessary for very young children who cannot yet read and perhaps for children who like to make their own stories up, but I would not use them in a secondary level
I’ve learned in my past years of reading and writing is that there is no perfect way to do it. It took me a lot of practice to be able to overcome my worst fear of learning how to read. I never thought being a bad reader would have happened to me, but it did. I learned that if I set my mind to becoming a better reading it would happen, which it
They necessitate dissimilar skills and teaching methods. Another solution is to construct reading activities so that there is a before, during and after stages of reading knowledge. Expository text comprises the greater part of what we read which includes essays, directions, documents, journals, magazine and newspaper articles, and other things. Students need to familiarize themselves with how these texts work and what to do when they start reading these types of texts. Chris Street wrote an original research article, “Expository Text and Middle School Students: Some Lessons Learned”, and tells us that middle school students face difficulty reading expository texts because they were not taught how to read in this fashion while in elementary school.
I have learned about writing of course, but I have learned more than I have in past English courses. This journey was certainly not an easy one to begin since I had been out of school for so long, but so far it is fair to say that it is paying off. Writing has always been a passion of mine so even though I had to take this
Ever since I have taken a higher English class such as AP it became more challenging for me. As such the class need good writing skill beyond my capabilities, and causes me to struggle once again. Despite the setback, I shall not give up on such an issue; I definitely make my writing skill become better. Therefore I begin write to the best of my abilities and often ask other people around to help peer editing my essay. After many try of writing an essay, I got better understanding of what to fix when write and quickly know to make my own sentence sound best.