Literacy narratives are stories about an author’s experiences with reading, writing, or speaking. Often, these narratives focus on specific
Learning Objectives:
Students will practice:
Using narrative structure
Writing rich descriptions
Organizing a paper around a central theme rather than a traditional thesis statement
Supporting claims with evidence, such as logic, reason, direct quotes, personal
observation, etc.
The Assignment:
Literacy narratives are stories about an author’s experiences with reading, writing, or speaking.
Often, these narratives focus on specific complications in the author’s experience and explore
how the author overcomes (or attempts to overcome) those complications.
For this assignment, you will write your own literacy narrative. This narrative will describe a
personal experience (with reading, writing, or speaking) that taught you something about
yourself and/or the world.
Choosing a Topic:
Narratives have different structures and conventions than the essays you have written in this
class so far. Narratives give you room to be more creative; they provide opportunities to try new
methods for organizing content, presenting ideas, introducing characters and dialogue, and so on.
However, all good narratives share some characteristics. Good narratives are clear and focused.
Good narratives are interesting. Good narratives are detailed and richly descriptive. Most
importantly, good narratives are significant; they teach the reader something about the author,
the world, or themselves as a deeper meaning behind the story is revealed. Therefore, it is
important to choose a topic that is meaningful to you. If the topic is meaningful to you, it will be
easier to explain why the topic might be meaningful to the audience.
Generally, short literacy narratives focus on one particular event or one series of events that take
place over a short period of time. Avoid choosing a topic that will require explaining many
events, characters, settings, or that occurs over a substantial period of time. You only have four
pages, and the detailed description that a narrative requires will make it difficult to cover a topic
with too many characteristics.
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