Literacy Narrative

[#1]

Assignment by Emily Gresbrink, Bedford New Scholar 2021

Project Overview + YouTube Walkthrough 

The Literacy Narrative essay asks you to recall a significant moment from your life about writing or learning to write. The work of this project will be done over the next three weeks in a guided, interactive, process-based sequence. Like every major project in this course, the project is about more than the final essay. It is about your inventing and drafting, getting practice seeing writing choices, giving and getting feedback, re-seeing possibilities and making changes, developing the ability to reflect on and learn from your choices. It is about engaging in rhetorical reading practice and developing writing strategies. It is about building a writing community by learning to give and receive feedback productively. It is about re-seeing possibilities, taking risks and making changes. It is about developing the ability to reflect on and learn from your choices. All of these are critical skills that successful writers use regularly.

This project and this course aim to support your understanding of writing both as a practice (something you do and develop skill by doing) AND as a subject of study (something we can analyze and think about in new ways in order to understand how it works). So you will write, and also study writing. You will study your own writing, your peers' writing and writing done by the authors of assigned course readings. The readings by four writers in Project 1 & 2 introduce you to some of the complex and powerful questions that make the study of writing compelling and important.

What do you need to do?  

This project asks you to reflect on your own writing experience -- a memory you have of yourself writing, or learning to write, or of something you think or thought about yourself as a writer. You'll turn these reflections into a written narrative. You might write about a struggle, a tension, a triumph, a question, or a belief related to writing in any realm of your life (personal, academic, career, social).

Why does this matter?

Whether you think about yourself as a writer or not, you are bringing writing experiences and ideas about writing into this class, and these are important. One of the goals of this first project is to bring your experiences and beliefs about writing into the center of our class. Here and throughout the course, you will get practice with composing processes that writers use to generate, draft, revise and edit writing AND you will get practice studying writing, the work writing does and the ways it does that work. We start out the class asking you to study writing as it relates to your own experience, and then to practice writing by engaging in some of the frameworks and practices that we will expand upon and use throughout the course.

What will I be looking for?

At the end of Project 1, you will be ready to turn in a final draft of your essay and a revision report that does the following:

• Effectively describes and develops the importance of a powerful moment or experience in your development as a writer.
• Meets a 1,000-1,500 word length
• Demonstrates rhetorical awareness by employing writing strategies that reflect decisions about audience and purpose. Areas of attention and intention include: language and voice, document design and accessibility, image selection and placement.
• Has been thoughtfully revised and reflected on, in alignment with feedback received from peers and instructor and writer’s own revision plan.

How will I be assessing your work?

All of your work in Project 1 is valued and important, so it is not just the final essay you produce that will be graded. This is true of every major project in this course. The activities you complete in Canvas are divided into the four categories described below.

1. Rhetorical Analysis: Writers will practice identifying and analyzing rhetorical contexts and the decisions of other writers through rhetorical reading activities, peer feedback, information literacy activity.
2. Writing Community: Writers practice engaging meaningfully in a writing community and participate in writing as a social, situated activity by responding to each other’s texts, reflecting on peer feedback received, practicing and responding to others’ use of writing strategies.
3. Revision and Reflection: Writers reflect on writing processes and meaningfully discover, reconsider, and revise ideas through Revision Plan, Revision Report.
4. Writing Product: Writers produce polished drafts that align with individual goals and assignment parameters.

The Revision Report

You will write a Revision Report when you have completed your final draft of your Literacy Narrative. Do not write this report until you are done making changes to your essay. This will be turned in at the same time as the final draft of your essay. This will be a one paged, single-space memo that outlines what revisions you made in your project. Your report should reference your revision plan.

Broadly, three things can happen when you work from a plan:

• You follow the plan.
• You change the plan.
• Most common, a combination of 1 and 2: you follow some things and change
  others.

For example, you may have decided to use two particular pieces of feedback but then found your idea for the second piece of advice not workable because of the changes that came from using the first piece of advice. So, explain this in your report.

In your plan there were things you were going to try to do, and you had strategies for executing them (“Tried to do/Executed by” thinking). In my response to your plan, during our conference, I asked you to try at least one thing. Your Revision Report should touch on how all those efforts went.

If things didn’t go as planned, whether the plan was the original one, a changed one, or the one I asked you to try, that’s okay. Not everything we try works as we hoped. And sometimes they work better than we could have imagined. The key is to try, to reflect on what happened, and to learn from that.

What matters for this report is that you can make that assessment and describe accurately how the revisions you implemented worked out.

Your report should take the form of a memo.
To: Instructor’s Name
From: Student Name
Date: Due-date for this memo
Subj: Revision Report for Learning to Write Essay

Include the four elements below:

1. Give a statement of your project’s audience and purpose. Here’s an example from a prior student: “I wrote this with people from my neighborhood in mind. My goal was to share how their interactions with me helped me to learn to write. I wanted them to come away pleased with their role in my life and see this memory as a thank you.”
2. Describe your revisions using these three categories. Provide reasons for your judgments
   a. What went well
   b. What could have gone better.
   c. What didn’t work at all and was dropped?
3. Create a personal writing goal that you want to meet or work on in that essay.
   a. Choose a goal that is concrete, that you can create a strategy around, and that you can show evidence of working on in the drafting, feedback (given and received) and revising you will work on. (So, "get better at writing" is NOT a concrete or helpful goal. But, "devote substantially more time to feedback and revising the stage of my writing" could be, if you come up with a strategy for how you will do this.)
4. Name one concrete thing you would like me to focus on when I read your draft.

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