Project1: Language Narrative Essay
“Exploring Ourselves”
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Assignment: Explore one of your experiences with language or literacy and how it has affected you. In your narrative, dramatize this experience and reflect upon its significance/impact in your life. Ultimately, your narrative should show a unique insight about the function, effect, and/or importance of language or literacy in your life. |
Steps:
1. Identify a literacy experience to write about.
Some ideas:
· An experience as either a child or adult learning a language or developing another skill.
· An influential person/event that helped or hurt your progress toward being a writer, using language, or becoming part of a group.
· Analyze cultural attitudes toward literacy/reading/writing and explore how you have navigated some of those.
· Discuss how you communicate with other “experts” – other people who share your literacy.
2. Brainstorm important ideas and interesting details from your experience.
Some questions to consider:
· What background information should your reader know?
· What details will help make this narrative more interesting?
· What was the outcome of this experience?
3. Write and revise your draft.
To develop your narrative, you should consider using:
· Descriptive details
· Vivid scenes and imagery
· Reflections
· Anecdotes and dialogue
· Figurative language (similes and metaphors)
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Important Dates: First draft due: Tuesday, February 1st Final version due: Tuesday, February 8th Upload all assignments to D2L |
Assignment Details: Length: 5 – 6 pages (1,200 – 1,500 words) Audience: Peers & Instructor Formatting: MLA – Times New Roman font, 12pt. size, double-spaced, 1-inch margins |
Tips for Project 1:
1.
Show
– don’t just tell.
· As much as possible, illustrate your main points through specific, vivid examples and descriptions that demonstrate what you mean. Help your reader to feel your emotions and understand your perspective. This will make your narrative more engaging for your readers!
2. Why should we care?
· Show us the insight you’ve gained from your experience. If you’re having trouble figuring that out, try asking yourself these questions:
· Why should other people care about this experience?
· How could this experience be relevant or insightful for other people?
· What do I hope to accomplish by sharing this story with other people?
3. “Literacy” is more than just reading and writing.
· In this project, the term “literacy” is used broadly. For our purposes, literacy is the ability to communicate and function in specialized situations.
Some examples of this are:
· Sports
· Music
· Jobs
· Hobbies
· Second/Foreign languages
· Culture/Travel
4. Get FREE help. Visit the
Writing Center (Think Tank)
or the Writing Skills Improvement Program on campus to get help on the writing and revision process.
University of Arizona
