One concept that I believe applies to my Literacy Narrative is Alexander’s concept of success. She says that 30% of all the narratives she looked at were written based on success in the writers’ literacy experiences. This relates to my narrative completely because my whole Literacy Narrative is based on a success story; going into freshman year I hated reading, but after that year I began reading on my own time. This ultimately made me a better reader.
Brandt’s concept of sponsors also connects to my Literacy Narrative because the main focus of my narrative was how Ms. Petersen, my ninth grade English teacher, helped me become a better reader. She introduced me to a new kind of story that I never was able to read in school before. Ms. Petersen allowed my classmates and me to read just about any book we were interested in reading. Brandt also talks about how the sponsors in these narratives lend their resources to help the writer have a successful experience with literacy. After reading The Maze Runner I asked Ms. Petersen for the next two books in the series but she didn’t have them. The thing is, she was so happy that I enjoyed that book so much that she ordered the next two books so that I could read them.
I did not do a very good job of drawing this picture. It was a lot more difficult than I was expecting. I am not a good artist to begin with and I found it really hard to focus on drawing lines instead of a hand. I started out thinking about drawing lines on a page, but as I continued I found myself thinking about how those lines look nothing like a hand. I could not focus on just lines. I ended up thinking about the hands, the shoulders, the head, and the eyes and nose. That is most likely why my drawing doesn’t look like the one in the book.
Both King and Alexie used many great literary remarks when describing the stories of their past. But first I will be explaining my reasoning behind the annotations I made on Stephen King’s, On Writing. In this story King brought us into his past to, what seems to be, the time he realized he wanted to be a writer. He is able to write in a way that makes the readers feel like they went to high school with him. For example, after King is caught with his humorous writing he explains how he was, “ushered into Mr. Higgins’s office” (King 54). When he uses the word “ushered” the reader is able to really see what was going on. It paints the picture of someone escorting him into the principles office and it was a scary, stressful moment for King. There was another sentence in the story that stood out to me in showing great detail in his writing. King was given the opportunity to be the sports journalist for his school newspaper and after the job was offered to him he looked at everyone in the office and he explains the look of, “Do it or Die” (King 55), on his guidance counselor’s face. This sentence shows the understanding King had for how bad his piece of writing was. When someone looks at him like that it’s obvious that he should accept the job.