Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer:
WRD 103X Essay Two: Literacy Narrative
“How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live.” –Henry David Thoreau
Assignment: Tell a story about your writing. Concentrate on one event that crystallized what now matters most
about who you are or want to be as a writer. Engage your readers' senses with descriptive language to evoke the
same feelings you felt. Arrange the narrative to show change and have an effect on the reader. Impart a lesson
either explicitly or implicitly. Observe MLA format guidelines. Aim for 750-1000 words.
Pages 27-51 in the Norton Field Guide detail how to plan, draft, and revise a literacy narrative with four helpful examples.
Purpose: After having analyzed the rhetorical choices of a published writer in the previous assignment, turning
your gaze now onto your own developing awareness of writing should move you toward even greater control of
your rhetorical choices in subsequent academic writing assignments. Struggling to embed an idea in a narrative
should enhance your sense of genre and form. Endeavoring to delight your readers should remind you of the
pleasure of storytelling—and writing in general. Articulating your current identity as a writer should ground and
goad your further development.
Process:
1) Employ more than one pre-writing technique to discover your ideas (due 4/20).
2) Structure your ideas according to your intended effect (see NFG: 47).
3) Draft a first attempt at narrating your story (due 4/29 on 3 printed copies and on D2L).
4) Revise next draft(s) based on my and your peers’ comments during the workshop (due 5/4 on D2L).
5) Proofread the final draft to remove errors and demonstrate professionalism (due 6/10 on Digication).
Considerations: Entertain us. Choose a story you love and bend it to fit the narrative of your developing writing.
Be metaphorical. Use this assignment as both an inquiry into your own feelings about writing and a step further
into the spotlight. Can you hold sway over a crowd?
