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Makayla Estep
Weaver
Rhetoric 101
September 9, 2014
Imagine
Literacy is defined by having the ability to communicate and interact with people.
People are not born with this ability therefore, it has to be taught. Over the course of years of
trial and error and certain experiences a persons literary identity is molded into something that is
fully and completely personalized to them. Heres the journey of my literary identity.
Through my school years there were many instances that helped me realize what
literacy was and how to apply it to myself. During preschool, when I was three, our class read
Green Eggs and Ham. After the reading, our class was presented with literal green eggs and
ham. Being a three year old this blew my mind. You could actually eat the food and it tasted
good. This exercise opened my eyes to the fact that literacy can become something tangible and
can become truly incredible. Ever since that experience I began to imagine exactly what the
authors described in the book and how it would look off the page and in the real world. It was
like the movie, Gifted Hands, in the scene where the mother and main character are discussing
reading. The son says that its difficult to read because he finds it boring. The mother then asks
the boy what he sees when she says that there is a little blue mouse. He claims nothing at first but
after a church sermon where the preacher tells a bible story about courage, the boy begins to
visualize that he is in the story and there is a little blue mouse as his sidekick throughout his
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daydream. Words brought more meaning to him than what they initially did. His imagination
propelled him forward to become an avid reader and enjoy every word.
It was a long time since the impact of literacy hit me again, it wasnt until senior year.
My English teacher, Mrs. Burcham-Hall, had a love for anything pertaining to literature. How
she would speak in regards to the texts that we were studying caught my attention and I began to
realize how important this old literature was to the English language. Beowulf was the first
text she introduced to us; her introductory lesson exhibited how Beowulf was the first text written
in Old English and how far the language itself has become as a whole. She even let us listen to
sections of Beowulf in Old English which was quite interesting. The studies that we performed
about The Canterbury Tales and The Green Knight were similar and continued to inspire me to
dive more into classic tales. Her teaching style was something that was new to me, it was more
abstract and text + you = meaning oriented. In my earlier years it was more find the facts,
summarize the story, and then test on it. In her class it was geared more your thoughts and
feelings towards a story or poem and then we would write an essay about it. We had to pick apart
the texts and pay attention to the sections that normally readers wouldnt pay attention to. This
taught me that every single sentence, every single word, was crucial to the story. The study that
focused on Shakespeare was entertaining as well; it was the beginning of a love affair between
myself and plays. The Importance of Being Earnest was the most enjoyable play I had read and
was the perfect book to get my toes wet in the world of plays, before diving into the master of
plays himself, Shakespeare. My love for literature grew with each piece of literature.
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Its funny how your parents will tell you things that happened while you were a child
when you get old enough to understand the significance of the story. My mom would tell me
crazy stories all the time, but there was something that she told me that stuck with me. She said
that she would read to me and my brother when we were tiny before we went to bed. Im not
entirely sure of this correlation however; I feel that this had influenced me to pursue the stories
in the books that she would read. There is one book I remember distinctly, it was titled You Are
Special, my mom would read it most nights - which probably was due to me always picking it.
This book was about a town full of wooden puppets and the master carver lived on top of the hill
watching over all of them. Every day the puppets would give each other either a black dot sticker
or a golden star sticker depending on the appearance and abilities of the puppet. The main
character always received dots no matter what he tried to do until one day he met a female
puppet to which no stickers would stick. He questioned why the stickers wouldnt stick to her
and she replied for him to go talk to the master carver every day and the stickers would not stick.
He went to talk to the master carver the next day and realized that it did not matter what the other
puppets thought of him, what actually mattered was what the master carver thought. Once he
realized this the black dots began to fall off and he became truly happy. I believe that this has
influenced my mentality significantly; I dont try to impress people I just try to remain true to
myself. In the later years my grandma used to take my cousins, brother, and me to the local
library every summer since we started school all the way up to middle school. She would take us
there to see special exhibits and shows. The normal schedule would be a volunteer would read a
short story about something and then the actual subject would appear and we would get to play
with it. One show I can remember was where a woman read a book about snakes and then an
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actual reptile handler came in with snakes. A book brought out something tangible immediately,
connections were connected and realizations came into play.
Another thing that I learned through the years was that the movies, although they may
be a good reference, are nothing like the actual words that an author has written on a page. Im a
purist because of this. In my eyes books will always be better than the movies. I also possess this
insatiable desire to be different from everyone else, to stand out. No one in my house likes to
read, except for my mom, so following her footsteps, I decided to be different and become a
passionate reader. There are shelves and shelves of books in my room- I have two book shelves
that are packed full- and I have read every one of them thanks to this quality I possess. Many of
these books are classics such as The Jungle, Great Expectations, and The Grimm Brothers
Fairytales. Every book has a whole other world written in them and allows my imagination to
travel the world without leaving my room. The beautiful factor about books is that you have
control of everything. You possess the ability to be the set designer, the casting director, and the
sound effects technician. The author is allowing you to play with their words on a blank canvas.
The possibilities of how the world can turn out are infinite.
There are many events that change a persons literary identity. Moments in life that
change the way you view reading, writing, communicating and those moments are the most
crucial in life. Those moments where I realized that books can indeed become something great
and creative, gave me my literary identity. Imagination is the key when reading a book or writing
a paper. Engage the audience no matter the subject. Imagination is my literary identity.