Literacy through athletics

David Perley (800774993) T/Th 3:30

You might be wondering how in the world could athletics help your literacy? its Its actually quite simple. When thinking about literacy someone may automatically think of books, signs, language and even braille. While growing up, I have played a total of 6 different sports competively, and lettered in 4 sports in high school. During the course of playing these sports, it has taught me a lot of things dealing with literacy that you might never remotely think about. The first sport that I ever tried was baseball and I played pitcher. Pitching the ball isnt as easy as it may look. Its just throwing a ball right? No, no its actually a difficult concept. You have to create an imaginary box for every batter that comes between the elbows and knees. Those squares differ in size depending on the type of person who may be up to bat. To get a strike you have to throw it in that area without the player hitting the ball. You have to have precision, and precision in writing can relate to everything including your vocabulary and word use, and getting to the point. If you just ramble on and on, you dont know where to end or how to make a connection to the reader, their imaginary box. You can pitch a baseball all day but if theyre not strikes, they dont have a chance to hit the ball, a swing and a miss. Soccer was a huge sport for me during the course of my athletic career. I played recreational at first and worked my way up to playing it competitively through AAU and throughout middle school and lettered for a varsity sport in high school. Soccer is purely a cardio sport; you have to run a hell of a lot. People have to be constantly running back and forth on a 100 yard+ field for 90 minutes. In writing that taught me how to keep it going because there are situations where you might run 40 yards just for a chance to touch the ball and then someone else

Comment [KA1]: Be careful addressing the reader directly with you. Its better in an essay to avoid the second person.

Comment [KA2]: Can you offer some alternatives for literacy before you start talking specifically about sports? Comment [KA3]: Spell out your numbers Comment [KA4]: Could you briefly name some of the overarching things that sports have taught you?

Comment [KA5]: Since this is an essay about you, could you rephrase it to be I or Me?

Comment [KA6]: Great comparison! Good job connecting the two.

Comment [KA7]: You need a better transition here for your reader.

beats you there or it goes out of bounds. For writing it taught me to even though you may not know what to write about or your rough draft may completely fail, you have to have endurance. Always keep going and keep trying no matter how bad when winning or losing. Try out tons of ideas trying to put them together and if it doesnt work out you just have to keep going. Basketball taught me to practice, practice, and practice. No one can be naturally good at anything without practice. Someone who hasnt ever written before wouldntwont be able to write this big paper successfully;, it would be scrambled up and out of synch and wouldntwont make sense. Just like in basketball someone cant just pick up a basketball for the first time and know how to dribble through 10 people and drain a three. All these famous basketball players and writers had to start somewhere and to get to the point that they are at now they had to practice a ton to get to where they are today. Volleyball was a very fun sport that I played in middle school and the skills learned from volleyball are similar to basketball. The thing volleyball taught me was sometimes you just have to dive right in and go for it. During a spike its a natural instinct to turn away or dodge the ball to prevent from being hit. In writing when you are in a class and your professor assigns you a paper with a topic that makes you cringe or turn away. Instead of dodging it you just have to dive for the ball and get it over the net and hope for the best. If you dont dive and go for it you know for a fact that the ball is going to hit the ground. Now if you dive for the ball, it gives another chance for another teammate to get it over the net and possibly even score a point. Not everyone likes the particular assigned essay, but you just have to try your best and give it all you got. You dont know until you try. When comparing football to literacy, people usually think of the playbook. All players have to memorize huge play books and when they dont remember the play when its called, it ruins the play completely. One persons role can affect the overall outcome of that drive. Every
Comment [KA11]: Can you connect this cooperative aspect to what you do in the classroom? Comment [KA10]: This seems redundant because you already have to get to the point that they are at now earlier in the sentence. Comment [KA8]: Again, I really like the connections that you are making, but it would work better if you wrote it from your perspective rather than as advice for your reader. Comment [KA9]: transition

player has their role on the team. Coaches have to recognize the type of defense the other team is in or if the other team is going to throw the ball or run it and call plays accordingly. In writing, football taught me organization and flow. When writing papers you cant just randomly talk about a subject and place it anywhere in the paper. It all has to flow together, be organized and make sense. Just like football every player and every sentence has a role on the team and paper. If one player or sentence is out of place, it could ruin the whole play or paper. You cant just have a random filler sentence and ruin the flow of the paper just like a player whos not in the right place or doesnt know what theyre doing and ruin the flow of the game. During the last two years of high school I played lacrosse. Now lacrosse is a very confusing and hard game to play. Just like a paper all the skills that I learned from previous sports I had to use them all in this one sport alone. The precision of baseball, the endurance of soccer, the amount of practice like in basketball and at the same time still have the organization of football. The playbooks were even more complex than football because in football its a set play but in lacrosse its a play, but you are constantly moving trying to confuse the opponent. Not only does it require all of that, but I realized my first practice that you just have to dive right in like in volleyball as well. When a player is cranking back for a shot you either rush at him and block it, or cringe and let him have a free shot on goal. So in dealing with lacrosse it taught me how to incorporate all the skills I learned in previous sports and use them all together for this one sport. Thats just like all the skills that are used while writing. For some of you who play these sports this may make absolutely perfect sense and meanwhile those of who you dont participate in sports are going like huhhh? Its all about the experience, and with the experiences that I had and the skills I gained from playing all these sports, I can now incorporate them in my writing and create my own personal type of literacy.
Comment [KA13]: I like this comparison too, but you may want to rephrase the last couple of sentences to avoid run-ons. You could also play with parallel structure to strengthen your writing. Comment [KA14]: How are you transitioning into this new topic? Comment [KA15]: What do you mean by this? Comment [KA16]: This sentence is reading like you are comparing baseball, soccer, and basketball to football. If you are trying to compare all four to lacrosse, then you may want to mention lacrosse in the sentence too. Comment [KA17]: Could you expand on this idea? Comment [KA18]: Im not sure if this sentence is working for me as a reader. Is there another way that you could get this point across? Comment [KA19]: You may want to expand your conclusion a bit more. Go back to how you are defining literacy in the introduction and briefly tie in how all of these sports work for it and for writing as well. Comment [KA20]: David, I enjoyed reading your essay and I think that you have made some great connections to how sports contributed to your literacy development. I think that your essay could be even stronger if you focused on three main aspects of your essay. 1) Try to figure out what is the main message about your literacy that you want to get across to readers. Then, use that main message as an anchor for the rest of your paper that all of your examples relate to. If you are comparing literacy to what you learned in sports, then I should see you coming back to that idea again and again. 2) Work on developing your examples a bit more. You have good examples, but the reader needs to see how these points led to your literacy development. Make the connection apparent for your readers. 3) Work on your conclusion. Remember that the conclusion is one of the most important pieces to the paper because its the last thing that the reader sees. Try to make it tie to the essay a bit more through imagery and tying all ideas together. Overall, I think that you have a good start with great connections between sports and literacy, and I look forward to seeing what you do in the next draft. KA (Projected Grade: 83) Comment [KA12]: Can you make this sentence a little easier for the reader?