This assignment is an essay that focuses on your life as a writer. Since reading is connected to the process of writing, your reading experiences can be a part of this paper as well. In essence you will be answering the questions, “Who am I as a writer? What specific writing experience(s) made me this way?”
One part of this paper will be a reflection of one (or more) assigned literacy narratives in this uit. The other, longer part of this paper will be a combination of your own experiences and your reflections on these experiences. Therefore, I want you to keep in mind that you need to make sure the reader (your audience) knows why you’ve chosen to share particular memories and why they matter to you, as well as how you read and connected with the assigned literacy narrative. Your paper should explore those things you have in common with the author, as well as those things that are different, and why. Your paper must also have a theme. You won’t really know this theme or pattern before you begin, but it will emerge through revision and drafting.
Structure: The structure of a personal essay relies on the idea of coming to know yourself and your place in the world. The focus is on discovery, moving between the past and the present, what happened to what happens, showing and telling. If you want, you can include pictures or artifacts with your narrative as long as it helps convey your message. Though this is also a personal essay, it will be a more formal essay than our first one in that you will be including not only your own experiences, but an analysis of the experience of another writer.
We will also read examples of writing autobiographies and do classroom work that will help you prepare for this paper.
Having been a reader and writer for many years, I have read countless books and written countless words. However, I still owe most of my interest and passion for reading and writing to an early childhood reading experience, a book of fairy tales, to be precise. This book was the birthday present when I was six. It was called “A Collection of Fairy Tales from Ten Thousand Counties,” as translated from Chinese. Obviously, there weren’t so many stories in the book, but for me back then, it was already a very thick one. At first, my parents would read the stories in the book for me. As I began learning to read, I could finally do so independently without the help of my parents.
I found the stories in the book to be in differnet lengths. At first, I was only able to finish the shorter ones. With time, I began to read the longer ones and find them even more intriguing. The sense of accomplishment motivated me to read more. Moreover, it was the stories that were truly intriguing. Different from the simplified versions that were designed for children, this book did not have any illustration, except for a simple drawing at the beginning of each story. I think it was from that moment when I realized that the seemingly boring words on the page can be even more magical than a drawing. Unlike physical drawings, these stories intrigued my imagination about the world unknown to my young self.
The influence of a good book can be so profound that even after so many years, I can still remember some of the stories from the book. As most of the stories were foreign, I got to experience new things that had never occurred to me in real life. There was the story about the God and the Devil, the story of a priest, a Brahman, the story of a seal turning into a pretty woman and returning to the sea, stories about different types of animals, etc. These stories intrigued my imagination and curiosity about the world outside. It may even be the reason why I love traveling and seeing new cultures so much today. Back then, I had no clue what a Brahman was, or what God meant to a large population of the world, but I did learn about diversity. I learned that there can be so many different types of people living in all corners of the world, and I learned to have an open mind for differences.
Reading the different fairy tales from the different countries, I detected the differences among them since I was very little. It was intriguing that some of the stories were so sad and emotional, while others were light-hearted and funny. Some of the stories were very engaging and full of glorious details, while others were much shorter, leaving blanks to be filled by my imagination. Even with different lengths, I quickly discovered my preference for some stories over the others. Later, when I started writing, I unconsciously imitated the style that I preferred. For example, I remember when we were assigned to write a short story in elementary school, I used the same structure that I read from one of the stories, and filled in the details. That was when I realized the significance of style and structure, without even being taught the concepts.