Ourfirst essay is rather simple. It asks the question "What impact hasreading had on your life?" Please reflect on this question for a fewminutes and then post a short essay in the MLA format. If you have anyquestions, please let me know by email. Here is the full-pagedescription of the assignment:

Essay #1: Literacy Narrative

Write a short literacy narrative about yourself. Literacy narrativescan often have slightly different focuses, so you have a small amountof room for creativity, but they primarily deal with detailing aperson’s path to reading and writing (education and experiences as areader) 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 readingand/or writing) and not as much on “literature” (which we’ll be talkingabout in class). Your literacy narrative can involve your experienceswith various “great” books, but it will more likely encompass yourexperiences 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 theessay to take. If you are writing about your experience becomingliterate (learning to read and write), you will probably take anarrative approach, detailing your first experiences in school or yourfirst memories of books or the first time reading or writing seemed tomake a big impact on your life. In writing from this perspective, youwill want a clear introduction that establishes the story you plan ontelling, strong transitions and paragraphs (probably chronologicallyorganized) that put that overall story together, and a conclusion thatgoes 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 andwriting and how they have impacted your life, you would structure youressay in a more subject-by-subject fashion. Your introduction wouldestablish that you are writing about significant moments where literacyor particular texts impacted your life and give a sense of why thosemoments or texts are important. Your body paragraphs would be organizedaround each of those texts or moments, explaining what they were andnarrating why they mattered. In this structure, your conclusion wouldagain go beyond simple summary to put the discussion in a largercontext. Have those particular moments or texts changed the way youread or address writing now? How might those experiences be similar toor different from those of other individuals?

Regardless of how you organize the paper, the final draft of yourpaper needs to be typed, double spaced, and in 12 point font with oneinch margins. Your name, the instructor’s name, the course number, anddate 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 righthand 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 letyou know and give you plenty of time to resubmit.