Literacy Narratives

The more you know about yourself as a reader and writer, the more control you may have over these processes, and a great learning tool for taking stock of your prior writing and reading knowledge is a literacy narrative. A narrative is a story. A literacy narrative, in particular, is a personal story about literacy, usually about reading or writing, but sometimes about other skills and competencies that are required for someone to be considered “literate” in a specific area.

Reading Literacy Narratives

In English Studies we often analyze literacy narratives to better understand how people learn to read and write, as well as how opinions, thoughts, feelings, and interpretations become associated with reading and writing. It is useful for you to read and analyze other people’s literacy narratives not only to learn how to write one, but also to investigate your literacy narrative alongside the narratives of others to better understand your own relationship to literacy and the broader role of literacy in our culture and society.

A number of well-known authors have written literacy narratives that are anthologized in books and often available online:

“Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass (excerpted from his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave)

“Learning to Read” by Malcolm X (excerpted from his autobiography)

“Only Daughter” by Sandra Cisneros

“Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie

“One Writer’s Beginnings” by Eudora Welty

Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN)

For more varied literacy narratives, the online Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) “is an open public resource made up of stories from people just like you about their experiences learning to read, write, and generally communicate with the world around them.” You can browse or search the DALN for literacy narratives others have written about a wide range of topics, composed in a variety of modes and media.

TRY THIS to understand storytelling in various media. Consider the same story—any story, even fictional—told in various media. Media may include alphabetic (using words on a page or screen), audio, images, video, etc. You may even think about a book you have read that was adapted for film. Why might a writer choose various media to tell a story? How might various media affect the way the writer tells the story, as well as the audience’s experience with and reception of it? For example, what’s the difference between “hearing” a narrator’s voice in words vs. an audio recording, and what do writers need to consider and do to achieve their desired effects for the audience? What about “seeing” via words vs. images?

Writing Literacy Narratives

While you certainly could write a literacy autobiography—covering your literate life from birth until now—a literacy narrative need not be comprehensive. Your purpose is to provide a brief story, a snapshot of some association you have (or have had) with reading and/or writing. Therefore, it is helpful to choose a single literacy event, a specific incident or moment that occurred over a brief period of time.

As you brainstorm topic ideas, you could preface them with “the time when. . .” The time when you first read a book for enjoyment, when you used writing to cope with events in your life, when you learned HTML, when you learned the jargon and specialized terms for your job, when a special person in your life helped you with literacy, etc.

Storytelling 101

The overall goal for writers of any story is to show rather than tell. Rather than telling readers what happened, show us using the following strategies:

Narration. What happened? Is there a problem that needed to be solved, a situation to be resolved? Ideally there should be some kind of tension or conflict (even within yourself). Structure or order specific moments and scenes in a way that readers want to find out what happened and want to read on. Sequence the events in the narration: what happens in the story and in what order (the overall structure)—for example, should the story be told in chronological order or is it best to start at the middle or the end and employ flashbacks? What about the passage of time—should the story take place in one hour, one month, or span a number of years?

Description. How can we as writers enable our readers to picture scenes, settings, and characters? Where did this happen? Who was involved? While narrating what happened, describe in detail the setting and characters (what they look like, what they say, and what they do). Describe using sensory details (the five senses) so that readers can picture the setting and characters, and use dialogue so readers can hear your characters’ voices; do your best to re-construct from memory. You may also wish to employ figurative language such as metaphor, simile, or analogy to make comparisons that are not literal, maybe even not realistic.

Significance. What’s the point? So what? Be sure the narrative has a focused point—make clear why the incident matters to you. This point is what you are “showing” by narrating and describing throughout. Maybe you know the point before you start writing, or maybe you’ll need to discover it after you start writing the literacy event as you remember it.

For additional information read about storytelling strategies in the eBook Open English @ SLCC.