Brian Albro Professor Leslie Wolcott ENC1102 20 January 2014 My Literacy Narrative My ability to read and to write, and

the ways I do both, come from several influences in my life that happened at various times throughout growing up in to the writer that I am now. Some of my main literacy sponsors, as they are described by Deborah Brandt, a published researcher on literary sponsorship, were my parents, my teachers, and some events that shaped what I learned from them, whether it was in a way that they wanted or not. Using all of these different sponsors and scenarios, I have taken their teachings and shaped my own literacy. Taking it to the very beginning, I first learned to read from the bedtime stories that my parents would read to me before I went to sleep. This would happen every night for about a year until I had the words to every book memorized and began to associate the weird symbols on the pages to their sounds and meanings. After I had gotten bored with all of the books that I had in my room, I worked my way in to the small family library. This large bookshelf contained roughly eighty books, all well above my reading ability at the time, and most of them being fiction books. Regardless of their difficulty, I began trying to read them, gaining a special attachment to science fiction novels more than anything else because they allowed me to let my imagination run away and really have fun with the story, even if what was going on in my head didnt match up with the actual book. Eventually, through this process, I began to actually be

able to read and absorb what these books were saying on a deeper level than just the symbols on the page and the picture on the front. My parents didnt just help me in my reading literacy, but also in my writing literacy, and not in a way that they even meant to. The trick they taught me was some simple redirection and the ability to connect ideas to jump from subject to subject. For a very long time, my younger brother had an irrational fear of komodo dragons. The thing about these large lizards was that their saliva had so much bacteria, that a single bite by one would cause a lethal infection, a fact he had learned from watching way too much Animal Planet. Knowing this, he had convinced himself that a komodo dragon would either swim all the way from wherever they live or break out of the local zoo just to break in to our house, climb up the ladder to his bunk bed, and bite him. No matter how many times we tried to inform him that they wouldnt survive traveling that far through an ocean, they cant break through several inches of glass at the zoo, they cant break in to our house, and they cant climb ladders, he refused to listen. My parents then implemented a trick that I would eventually catch on to. Instead of talking about these horrific monsters whenever he began to panic, they were slowly begin to work the conversation towards something completely different. When I had finally realized what they were doing, I started to do it myself and used it to get my brother to stop panicking, much to my parents relief as they didnt have to do it anymore. What they didnt realize though, was that Id also start to use it on them to get myself out of trouble or having to do work. This sort of flow of ideas allowed me to be able to write later on more fluently and flowingly, even if I had no idea what I was talking about, by making small connections in to the next idea even if I had to make up a connection. The new ability of conversation manipulation lead into another habit I would develop: chronic lying. If there were things I didnt want known, like I hadnt done some homework, I

would be able to quickly come up with a lie to get the teacher or my parents thinking about something else or give the teacher reasonable suspicion that maybe she really did just lose it on her own. For a while, I let my lying get a little out of control, coming up with stories that I would then later have to back up with other lies, some of which conflicted with each other, and still had to keep a straight story that held at least a sliver of possibility. A prime example of this happening was a time where I hadnt finished a poetry project for an English class so I had told me teacher that my mom had taken it in to show her own English class that she was teaching at the time, and that my mom had forgotten that I needed it that day. When I got home, my mom then started questioning me on the project, asking why I hadnt turned in, so I told her that my teacher had moved back the day it was due because so few people had brought them in. Moments afterwards, I realized I gave two completely different stories to two people, who could easily contact each other at a moments notice, and both stories pinned the blame on the other. Somehow, I managed to turn in the project for a full score, but had to get my mom to sign a note confirming my story, not knowing that my mom had taught me how to forge her signature just in case it was really important and on the promise that I would tell her afterwards. With this lying ability, not just have my grades improved from what they would be, but so had my writing, as I could now write about a topic I knew nothing about and make myself seem like an amateur follower of the concept. Doing this was necessary because the topics chosen for FCAT are usually very obscure and writing a whole five paragraphs on something you dont know isnt easy. The last huge sponsor of my literacy was my fourth grade writing tutor and future fifth grade English teacher. My writing was rather bad going in to the fifth grade, and as an English teacher herself, my mom didnt want her first born to be a failure, like I was looking to be, so she

enrolled me to a local English tutor. I dont remember very much of what she taught me because I really didnt want to be there and was trying to rebel any way possible. The one thing I do remember learning and has had a huge impact on my writing was to not plan before writing. At first, she tried to teach me the opposite, that I needed to plan because thats what FCAT wanted to see and they were who I was writing for, but I resisted, saying it was a waste of time and paper. After a few tutoring sessions, she had learned about my ability to turn conversations and how I was fluent in lying, even at that age, and she told me then that I really shouldnt plan out what I say too much. Her reasoning for it was that I was more conditioned for improvised thinking, rather than planned out thoughts and ordered ideas. She said if I didnt plan at all and put whatever was in my head on paper, the writing would come out more naturally, and the writing would be a lot more flowing. Using this information, I aced the FCAT that year, and all the years to come. The only backfire about this writing strategy is that I have become absolutely awful at writing conclusions. All of these skills that I had accumulated throughout the years have come together to create my literacy in reading and writing and in a sense define me. Without all of these experiences that have happened in my life, I wouldnt have the literacy skills and tendencies that I do now, and I feel that I as a person would be completely different.