Donald Barthelme in 1964. Photograph: Ben Martin/Time Life/Getty
As an introduction to Donald Barthelme, whose fiction we will examine in class tomorrow, read this biographical sketch. After you read the sketch, compose a one- or two-paragraph journal entry that includes what you have learned about his writing style, and what you have learned about readers’ and critics’ mixed responses to his fiction.
Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” the story that we’ll read tomorrow in class, was originally published in The New Yorker, the magazine that recently featured “Katy Grannan’s Photograph of Taylor Swift.” That picture of Swift appears below. I did not include it on your assignment handout because the photograph itself wasn’t important to the exercise. The assignment asked you to explore how a writer creates an unconventional portrait of a subject by forgoing physical description and focusing instead on other elements, such as mood and contrast. That journal exercise on the Swift portrait–or a reading assignment of your choice–serves as a warm-up for your analysis.
Petrusich, Amanda. “Amanda Petrusich on Katy Grannan’s Photograph of Taylor Swift.” The New Yorker, 12 Jan. 2026, pp. 44. Photo credit: Katy Grannan.
What makes a title effective? That’s an important question to consider since the title contains the first words of yours that a reader will encounter. First, it should be descriptive; it should evoke an image in the reader’s mind. It should also be relevant to your subject; it should convey something about the writing that will follow. Lastly, it should be intriguing; it should create in the reader a desire to keep reading. With those traits in mind, review the titles of your classmates’ literacy listed below. Which of them is most effective and why?
“Breaking through the Pages”
“The Beauty of Discomfort”
“A Challenge Wrapped in a Smile”
“Editing the Story of Myself”
“Finding My Way through Words”
“Giving Voice to the Unheard”
“How to Write about Myself”
“My Eighth Grade Spanish Class”
“The Paper that Changed my Life”
“The Passage”
“Prompted to Say More”
“Reading Changed My Mind”
“Surviving Ingrid”
“Why I Hate the Letter R“
“Writing is Hard”
Bonus Assignment Opportunity
Directions
Determine which of the literacy narrative titles you deem most effective.
Compose a comment of one complete sentence or more that includes (1) the title enclosed in quotation marks, and (2) a brief explanation of its effectiveness.
Post your comment as a reply to this blog entry no later than 5 p.m. today, Tuesday, February 3. (To post your comment, click on the post’s title, and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will then see the image of an airmail envelope with a leave comment option.)
I will approve your comments (make them visible) before Wednesday’s class.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, we will read and discuss Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School.” That story and the texts we have studied thus far in English 1103–“MeTalk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into Life,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and the excerpt from the first chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird–are among the pieces of writing that may serve as the subject of your upcoming analysis. Before you begin drafting that assignment on Wednesday, February 11, we will examine two more texts that may serve as your subject.
Panels from a Sunday Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz, 10 February 1974.
This morning, in place of our in-person class, you will compose a response to a designated* classmate’s literacy narrative. Directions for the assignment follow. Read the directions in their entirety before you begin typing your response. If you have any questions, please email me.
Directions
Go to the class blog page, and click on the link for the blog of the classmate whose name follows yours. If you are last on the list, go to the blog of the student whose name is first.
*If your designated classmate’s blog is not linked to the page, or his or her literacy narrative is not published, choose another classmate’s blog.
Read the classmate’s literacy narrative.
Compose a one- or two-paragraph response (75 words, minimum) that includes both the classmate’s name and the title of his or her literacy narrative. In your comment, address one or more of these elements: the title, vivid details, scene, dialogue, the image documenting part of the writing process away from the screen, the embedded link to a relevant website. Note that you will mention the classmate by name, but you will not refer to him or her in third person. In other words, you will not write, John’s description made me feel as if I were with him in his fourth-grade classroom. Instead, you will write, John, your description made me feel as if I were with you in your fourth-grade classroom.
Recommended (not required): Draft your comment longhand in your journal.
After you have composed your response, review the section of Writing Analytically devoted to basic writing errors, or BWEs (426-44), and correct any that you can identify in your blog response. This step is for your own comment, not your classmate’s literacy narrative.
Type your response as a comment. You should see a leave comment/reply option at the top or bottom of the post. If you do not see that option, click the title of the blog post, and scroll down. You should then see leave comment/reply.
Before you click leave comment/reply, copy your comment (on a PC, copy with control + c; on a Mac, copy with command + c).
After you submit your comment on your classmate’s blog post, return to this post, and paste your comment as a reply (on a PC, paste with control + v; on a Mac, paste with command + v). This step is critical because your classmate may not approve your comment, which means it will not be visible on his or her blog post. To receive credit for the assignment, you must post your duplicate comment as a reply to this blog post, “ENG 1103: Literacy Narrative Peer Responses.“ To submit your comment, click the title of the post, then scroll down to the bottom. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and click Comment. Post your comment by the end of today’s class period (11:50 a.m.).
I will make your comments visible after the deadline.
You are not required to read other classmates’ literacy narratives, but I encourage you to browse their blogs and read the posts that pique your interest.
Journal Exercise: Alternate Portraits
Since we are not meeting in person today, I will not conduct a check of the alternate portraits journal exercise that you completed, but you may have the opportunity to draw on that writing for another assignment. For now, think of that exercise as a warm-up for your analysis.
If you were absent on the day I distributed copies of the exercise, or you misplaced your copy, see the directions included in the class notes for January 21.
The photograph of Taylor Swift that accompanies Amanda Petrusich’s New Yorker piece will be included in tomorrow’s class notes.
If in-person classes are held on Wednesday, I will return your literacy narrative reflections with my annotations. Along with my handwritten notes, you will receive a handout of general notes on your reflective writing. An additional copy of those notes follows.
Reflection Notes
The directions for your reflective essay did not specify that you should double-space your writing, but know that in the future, you should always double-space your reflections and any other individual pieces of writing that you compose in class and submit for evaluation. The double-spacing guideline does not apply to group exercises and other shorter assignments.
You will not see a grade on your reflective essay for your literacy narrative, because that reflection and the two you will compose for your other two major writing assignments are not assigned grades. Instead, they factor in the grades for the major assignments themselves.
You will see a grade on the midterm and final reflections that you compose because those are stand-alone assignments.
All the reflections that you compose are essays, albeit short ones, and should consist of at least three paragraphs: an introduction, a body paragraph, and a conclusion.
Just as you indent the first line of each paragraph of an MLA-style typed document, the first line of each of your handwritten paragraphs should be indented approximately five spaces or one-half inch. In English 1103, the one exception to the indentation guideline is the writing on your blog. WordPress posts are easier to manage if you retain the default block style.
In all your reflections, you will be required to integrate a minimum of one quotation from a written text, either from a section of Writing Analytically or another course reading. Follow the directions for preparing to write your reflections, which will be posted on my blog. If you arrive at class unprepared or underprepared, you are likely to produce a reflection with a quotation that isn’t gracefully woven into your writing or one that isn’t properly cited.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, we will read a short story by Donald Barthelme. As an introduction to him and his fiction, read this biographical sketch. After you read the sketch, compose a one- or two-paragraph journal entry that includes (1) what you have learned about his writing style, and (2) what you have learned about readers’ and critics’ mixed responses to his writing.
Groundhog Day, Directed by Harold Ramis, performances by Bill Murray and Andie McDowell, Columbia, 1993.
Now that you have completed your literacy narrative, your first major paper assignment for the course, begin thinking about which essay, chapter, or chapter excerpt you have read (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” the excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird) that might serve as the subject of your second major writing assignment. Before you draft your analysis on February 11, we will study three additional texts that may serve as your subject, but you should begin thinking about which one we’ve studied so far that you may want to explore further.
Review “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” and the excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird, and ask yourself these questions:
Of the three texts, which one has the most striking details, or details that have lingered in my mind the most?
Do I want to explore those details further, to consider what they imply, and how they relate to the rest of the text?
Record your answers in your journal, and ask yourself those questions again when we study “The School,” “Back Story,” and the opening paragraphs of “The Falling Man.”
In a Word . . .
In the Coming Soon notes below, I mention that your short reading for Monday (part of which is pictured above) serves as a prelude to both Monday’s in-class writing and your upcoming analysis. Those words about words may guide you to your subject: the text you will revisit for closer study.
For Monday, read these short sections of Writing Analytically: “Focus on Individual Words and Sentences” (48-49) and “Words Matter” (49-50). Those word-focused readings serve as a prelude to Monday’s in-class writing assignment and the analytical writing you will produce for your second major paper assignment.
In class on Monday, you will read a designated classmate’s literacy narrative on his or her blog, and compose a response that you will submit as a comment on the writer’s post. Bring your laptop to class, and also be sure to bring Writing Analytically and your journal with your completed exercise on “Amanda Petrusich on Katy Grannan’s Photograph of Taylor Swift” or an assigned reading of your choice. Do not remove the exercise from your journal before class. I will not collect the assignment; I may simply conduct a check for it while you and your classmates are working on your blog exercise.
In the previous weeks, Scrabble blog posts have featured playable two-letter words that begin with a, b, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, and l. Today’s post features the playable two-letter words beginning with m, n, o, and p. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the other two-letter words in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.
M, by the way, is the most versatile consonant. In the first position, m pairs with every vowel: ma, me, mi, mo, mu, and also my. In the second position, m pairs with every vowel except i: am, em, om, um.
ma: a mother
me: a singular objective pronoun
mi: a tone of the diatonic scale
mm: an expression of assent
mo: a moment
mu: a Greek letter
my: a first-person possessive adjective
na: no, not
ne: born with the name of (also nee)
no: a negative answer
nu: a Greek letter
od: a hypothetical force
oe: a whirlwind off the Faero Islands
of: originating from
oh: an exclamation of surprise
oi: an expression of dismay (also oy)
om: a sound used as a mantra
on: the batsman’s side in cricket
op: a style of abstract art dealing with optics
or: the heraldic color gold
os: a bone
ow: used to express pain
ox: a clumsy person
oy: an expression of dismay (also oi)
pa: a father
pe: a Hebrew letter
pi: a Greek letter
Scrabble Zzz’s
Although there is no set time limit for making a play in non-competitive Scrabble, be mindful that making fewer than fifteen-to-twenty plays in a seventy-minute class period (minus five minutes for your break) indicates that at least one of the two teams is spending an inordinate amount of time deliberating. Each play deserves careful consideration, but excessive pondering makes the game tedious and can also give your opponents an edge. The more time you spend determining what to play, the more time your opponents have to study the board–and possibly find a higher-scoring play than the one they had initially planned.
Southard, Meredith. Cartoon. The New Yorker, 26 Dec. 2022.
For Monday, read these short sections of Writing Analytically: “Focus on Individual Words and Sentences” (48-49) and “Words Matter” (49-50). Those word-focused readings serve as a prelude to Monday’s in-class writing assignment and the analytical writing you will produce for your second major paper assignment.
In class on Monday, you will read a designated classmate’s literacy narrative on his or her blog, and compose a response that you will submit as a comment on the writer’s post. Bring your laptop to class, and also be sure to bring Writing Analytically and your journal with your completed exercise on “Amanda Petrusich on Katy Grannan’s Photograph of Taylor Swift” or an assigned reading of your choice. Do not remove the exercise from your journal before class. I will not collect the assignment; I may simply conduct a check for it while you and your classmates are working on your blog exercise.
This morning, after your Scrabble debriefing, you will compose a short reflective essay focusing on the process of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. If you are still in the process of completing your essay (since you have until Friday morning’s hard deadline to post it), your reflection will address your work in progress. Instructions for your reflective essay are included below.
Directions: Compose a short reflective essay that documents the processes of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. Questions to consider include the ones listed below. You do not need to address all the questions. Focus on the ones whose answers reveal the most about your work.
When you began transferring the words from your handwritten draft onto the screen of your laptop or tablet, what did you observe about the process?
What aspect of the writing seemed the most challenging? Determining the focus of your narrative? Developing the story? Beginning a scene? Introducing dialogue? Crafting the conclusion? Why did that aspect of the writing seem the most challenging?
Did you change the subject of your narrative? If so, what was the original subject? What did you change it to? Why?
Did you change the organization of the narrative? For example, did you initially present the story chronologically, then begin in the present and move to flashback?
Did any of the sample essays or the chapter excerpt that we examined (“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day Language Came into My Life,” the excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird, “A Bridge to Words,” “Creativity is Key,” “The Journey of the Greatest Story”) prove helpful as a model? If so, how?
What do you consider the strongest element of your literacy narrative?
What is the title, and at what point in the process did you decide on it? Did you change the title during the writing process? If so, what was the original title?
What image did you include in your blog that documents part of your writing process away from the screen? Why did you choose that particular image?
What relevant website did you link to your blog post? Why is that particular site relevant to your narrative?
Include in your reflection a minimum of one relevant quotation from the textbook, Writing Analytically, from the section “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” or from “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay.” Introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation. At the end of your essay, include the heading Work Cited, followed by your work cited entry. (See the models below.)
Remember that the writing that follows the quotation should demonstrate its relevance. Although you are required to include a quotation, its presence in your writing shouldn’t seem obligatory. In other words, the quotation shouldn’t appear to be there simply because you were required to include it.
Example: When I began planning my literacy narrative, I was skeptical of the assertion that “the more you write, the more you’ll find yourself noticing, and thus the more you’ll have to say” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 157). However, as I wrote in my notebook about the difficulty of holding a page of newspaper when I was a preschooler, I once again saw how those long, thin sheets of newsprint would drape over me. Then I saw my parents holding their pages of newspaper with ease, and I was back in the den with them—where I was more than fifty years ago—marveling at their ability to read.
A variation on the previous option is integrating a quotation that serves as an epigraph in Writing Analytically. If you quote an epigraph, which is a quote at the beginning of a book or book section, intended to suggest its theme, you are presenting an indirect quotation.
Example: In The Situation and the Story, memoirist Vivian Gornick observes: “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened” (qtd. in Rosenwasser and Stephen). That notion of what matters became apparent to me as I drafted the conclusion of my essay. The story itself is not dramatic but the bridge it delineates—the one that connects my preliterate self to my reading self—signifies a vital crossing point in my life.
The words that I quote are Vivian Gornick’s, but the source is the textbook Writing Analytically. That is why the parenthetical citation begins with qtd. in, to indicate that the words are quoted in David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen’s book.
The paragraphs that follow include detailed but not comprehensive notes on the two sample narratives that you read and evaluated yesterday. Look to these notes as a guide for editing your own literacy narrative.
“Creativity is Key”: Notes on Content
The essay is not a narrative. The writer mentions his experience writing a Southern gothic story, and he briefly recounts writing about his training for track and field and international football (soccer), but the writer offers very few details. Focusing on one of those experiences and recreating one or more moments from it would transform the essay into a narrative and develop it into one that meets the six hundred-word minimum requirement.
“Creativity is Key”: Notes on Form
Form is less important than content, but easily avoidable errors of form may prevent readers from appreciating the content of your narrative. Creating a compelling story is hard work; proofreading isn’t. If you don’t get the easy part right, readers may stop reading.
The writer changes the font of the body of the paper to Times New Roman but does not change the font of the running header, which should also be Times New Roman.
The writer incorrectly adds an extra space between the first-page course information (in the upper left) and between the title and the first line of the essay. MLA-style manuscripts are double-spaced. Note that later, the writer also incorrectly adds space between the paragraphs.
The title should be typed in twelve-point font, which is the font size that should be used throughout the document.
The title should not appear in boldface.
The title should be centered.
In MLA style, all major words in a title, including the final one, are capitalized (“key” should be “Key).
The second “sentence” of the second paragraph is a fragment because the meaning of “one being my senior year . . .” is dependent upon the clause that ends the previous sentence. See Writing Analytically, page 426-29.
The comma between “all” and “matter” is a comma splice. See Writing Analytically, 429.
“[R]eal life” should be hyphenated (as real-life) when it functions as a compound modifier. Ditto for “open minded” and “four to five.”
Errors of letter case–upper rather than lower, or vice versa–are mistakes of mechanics that are prevalent in the second paragraph. Track, Field, defensive back, and Athlete should all begin with a lowercase letter.
“[F]elt like” should be “felt as if.” In comparisons, use “like” before a noun and “as if” before a clause.
“I’m a writer that” should be “I’m a writer who.” The correct relative pronoun for a person is “who,” not “that.”
“The Journey of the Greatest Story”: Notes on Content
“The Journey of the Greatest Story” is a well-told narrative, but one with a glaring omission: Kate Chopin’s words. The writer claims that the last sentence of The Awakening affected her profoundly, but the absence of those words may lead readers to question the writer’s reliability. If Chopin’s words were so memorable, why aren’t they on the page? Near the end of the narrative, the writer states that she “can still recall key details from the story” (par. 4), but provides no examples. The only detail the writer mentions is Edna Pontelier’s suicide by drowning, which is a well-known fact about the novel.
The writer may have chosen to withhold Chopin’s last sentence from her introductory paragraph because she wanted to focus instead on what followed: the “loud slam of the book as he [the teacher] shut it” (par.1). Still, the writer could have included it later. For example, when she writes about the feelings the novel evokes, she might have included a sentence such as this:
I kept thinking about the last sentence: “There was a hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air” (Chopin, ch. 39).
Quoting The Awakening doesn’t require having a copy of the novel at hand. The complete text is available on Project Gutenberg. The parenthetical citation in the example above follows the format for an unpaginated online book (author’s last name, chapter abbreviation, and chapter number). The MLA work cited entry for the book appears below. Note that in a manuscript, the entry would have a hanging indent, which means the first line would be flush left and any subsequent lines would be indented five spaces or one-half inch.
“The Journey of the Greatest Story”: Notes on Form
The Awakening (pars. 2, 4) should be italicized rather than underlined. In the process of composing her draft longhand, the writer learned that titles of book-length works are underlined in handwritten documents, and she mistakenly applied that rule to her typed revision.
The word as should not precede “the final sentence” (par. 1), because it is used improperly there. As offers comparison, shows reason, or introduces a clause. Here are two ways the writer could revise the sentence:
I still remember the moment the final sentence of the story slipped from my teacher’s mouth, and the loud slam of the book as he shut it.
I still remember the final sentence of the story slipping from my teacher’s mouth, and the loud slamming of the book as he shut it.
The second example above is more direct because the writer doesn’t tell the reader it’s a moment. Instead, she lets the moment happen. The strike-throughs indicate that “of the story” (par. 1) is an unnecessary phrase. The writer has already established that The Awakening is her subject. Also, if specifying the book is necessary at any point, it should be referred to as a novel, not a story.
The writer describes Edna Pontelier as “submerging as death grew upon her” (par. 2), but growing indicates a rise, while submersion indicates a lowering. Grew should be replaced with engulfed.
The writer incorrectly uses hyphens to set off the appositive “-the author-” (par. 2). Here are two ways the writer could correct the presentation of the appositive and edit the passage for brevity:
I yearned for more pages to materialize to clarify the ending, or to have a chat with Kate Chopin–the author–so she could relieve my frustration by explaining the conclusion. Instead, I just sat and pondered those aggravating feelings.
I yearned for more pages to materialize to clarify the ending, or to have a chat with Kate Chopin, the author, so she could relieve my frustration by explaining the conclusion. Instead, I just sat and pondered those aggravating feelings.
An appositive can be set off by em dashes or commas, but commas are preferable for short appostives, so the second correction above is recommended.
The line “having me read this class” (par. 3) is not what the writer intended. The words shoud be having me enroll in the course or having me read Chopin’s novel.
When the writer responds to her teacher, she should begin a new paragraph because the speaker changes from him to her, with her words, “Have a nice day” (par. 3).
Years are an exception to MLA’s numbers rule regarding words and figures. 2025 should be written as 2025, not “twenty-twenty-five” (par. 4).
Posting to Blackboard
Log in to Blackboard and select the course site for ENG 1108.03, then scroll down to Literacy Narrative Submission Site.
Click LiteracyNarrative Submission Site. On the next page, click the black rectangle on the lower right, labeled View instructions.
The next page is where you will submit your literacy narrative file as an MS Word document or PDF. Click on the paperclip icon, and attach your file as you would an email attachment.
An important posting note: Be sure to click the gray rectangle labeled Submit, on the lower right. If you click Save and Close, your file will be saved to Blackboard, but it will not be submitted and will not be accessible to me. To submit your file, you must click Submit.
If you follow the steps above, voila! You have submitted your literacy narrative to Blackboard.
Posting to WordPress
Log in to WordPress, and you will see a home page similar to the one below. Hover over +New in the upper left of the screen, and click Post. You can also add a post by scrolling down the left menu to Posts (beside the pushpin icon) and selecting Add Post.
On the next page, type your literacy narrative title in the Add title line and hit return. Then copy and paste the text of your narrative from your MS Word file into the space below the title. On a PC, copy and paste with control + c, control + v; on a Mac, copy and paste with command + c, command + v.
After you have pasted the text, it will appear as single-spaced, block-style paragraphs. Do not indent. Your file posted to Blackboard should follow MLA formatting guidelines, including paragraph indentations, but WordPress posts are easier to manage if you keep the default paragraph settings. To add your required image between the title and the first paragraph, hover below the title, and a + will appear.
Click the +, and a menu will pop up with various options for add-ins. If Image is not among them, click Browse all.
Scroll down, and under the heading Media, click Image.
After you select Image, click Upload to add your picture. Do not post an AI-generated image or a stock photo from the Web. The image in your blog post should be a picture you took yourself that documents part of your writing process away from the screen. Note that the blog image you see below, and in Monday’s post, is a collage that includes snippets of my handwritten draft. Your image may be of your writing alone, or it may include other elements, as mine does.
Your image should now be centered on the page. If it isn’t, you can use the Align feature (shown above) to center it. If you would like the picture to be rounded, click on the picture, then click the half-black, half-white circle on the right (shown below). Then select the Rounded option.
Optional: To make the first letter of the first word of your literacy narrative a drop cap (or monogram), place the cursor on the first paragraph, and click Topography in the menu on the right (see the image below).
In the pull-down menu, click Drop cap, and a toggle switch will appear (see below). Click the toggle switch, and you will have a drop cap at the beginning of your narrative.
To add the required embedded link, open a new tab and go to the page you want to link to your post. Copy the address and return to the draft of your blog post. Highlight the word or phrase where you want to embed the link, and a link option will appear (see below).
Click the link icon, and a box will appear (see below).
Paste the address into the box, hit enter, or return, and the link will be embedded.
Save your draft (by clicking Save draft in blue in the upper right). Once you have finalized your post, click Publish. After you have published a post, you can still make changes. To do that, simply return to your dashboard, scroll down to Posts, click All Posts, then click edit under the post you want to edit (see below).
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short reflective essay focusing on the process of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. If you are still in the process of completing your essay on Wednesday (since you have until Friday morning’s hard deadline to post it), your reflection will address your work in progress.
Before class, read “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” (157-58) and “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay” (161-64). Those sections of the textbook, Writing Analytically, serve as companion pieces to your writing thus far in English 1103, and reading and taking notes on those sections will prepare you to compose the reflective essay you will write in class on Wednesday.
After you have read and taken notes on “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” and “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay,” choose a phrase, clause, or sentence relevant to your writing process and draft in your journal a short passage that connects that quotation to your writing. That passage will serve as part of your reflection. Detailed instructions for composing your reflection and including your chosen quotation will be included on the assignment handout that I distribute on Wednesday. Remember to bring your textbook to class.
Hillaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Today, in place of our in-person class, you will read and evaluate two student literacy narratives: “Creativity is Key” and “The Journey of the Greatest Story.” You will also read my model literacy narrative, “A Bridge to Words,” which appears below as a model for your own blog post.
Directions for writing and posting your evaluations of the student literacy narratives are included in the second half of this post, below the notes on “A Bridge to Words.”
A Bridge to Words
To a small child, the pages of a newspaper are enormous. Looking far back through the years, I see myself, not yet school age, trying to hold up those long, thin sheets of newsprint, only to find myself draped in them, as if covered by a shroud. Of course, back then, my inability to hold a newspaper properly was of little consequence. Even if I could have turned the pages as gracefully as my parents did, I couldn’t decipher the black marks on the page; thus, my family’s ritual reading of the newspaper separated them from me. As the youngest and the only one who couldn’t read, I was left alone on the perimeter to observe. My family’s world of written words was impenetrable; I could only look over their shoulders and try to imagine the places where all those black marks on the page had carried them—these people, my kin, who had clearly forgotten that I was in the room.
My sister, who was three years older, had her very own news source: The Mini Page, a four-page miniature paper that arrived at our house as an insert in the Sunday edition. While our parents sat in their easy chairs poring over the state and local news, my sister, Jo, perched at the drop-front desk and occupied herself with articles, puzzles, and connect-the-dots.
Finally, one Sunday, someone noticed me on the margin and led me into our family’s reading circle. Whether it was one of my parents or my sister, I don’t know. I remember only the gesture and the words: someone handing me the Sunday comics and saying, “You can read part of the funny pages, too. You can read Henry.”
I took the giant page and laid it flat in the middle of the oval, braided rug on the floor of the den. Once I situated the page, I lay on top of it with my eyes just inches above the panels of the comic strip. To my parents, my prone position was a source of amusement, but for me it was simply a practical solution. How else was someone so small supposed to manage such a large piece of paper?
As I lay on the floor and looked at the comic strip’s panels, I realized what the voice had meant. I could “read” Henry, the comic with the bald boy in a red shirt, because it consisted entirely of pictures. In between panels of Henry walking, there were panels of him standing still, scratching his hairless head. I didn’t find Henry funny at all. I wondered how that pale forerunner of Charlie Brown had earned a prime spot in the funnies. Still, I was glad he was there. He was the bridge that led me to the written word.
Reading the wordless comic strip Henry for the first time was the beginning of a years-long habit of stretching out on the floor with newspapers and large books—not thick ones but ones that were tall and wide, among them one of my childhood favorites: The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense. My sister and I spent hours lying on our bedroom floor, the pink shag carpet tickling our legs as we delighted in the antics of Rebecca, the mischievous title character of one of the poems.
Carl Thomas Anderson’s comic strip character Henry
“Rebecca”—which my sister read to me before I could read it myself—introduced me to the word “abhors,” the very sound of which appealed to me. Sometimes before Jo had finished reading the opening lines, my uncontrollable giggles collided with her perfect mock-serious delivery. As the last word in the first line, “abhors” serves as a lead-in to an enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause in a line break. It would be years before I learned the term “enjambment,” but I was immediately swept away by its effect in the opening lines: “A trick that everyone abhors/ In Little Girls is Slamming Doors” (Belloc 61). The first line lured me into the second one, and so on and so on. I was drawn both to the individual word “abhors”—with its side-by-side “b” and “h,” rare in English—and the way the words joined, like links in a chain, to yank me giggling through Rebecca’s cautionary tale:
It happened that a marble bust Of Abraham was standing just Above the door this little lamb Had carefully prepared to slam, And down it came! It knocked her flat! It laid her out! She looked like that.
Her funeral sermon (which was long And followed by a sacred song) Mentioned her virtues, it is true, But dwelt upon her vices too, And showed the dreadful end of one Who goes and slams the door for fun. (61)
Why these particular early memories visit me now, I don’t know. Perhaps rereading Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus with my students has roused the wordless Henry and the word-filled Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense from the corner of my brain where they’ve slumbered. The former wakes and stretches out in my mind as a bridge to the latter: a spot in the world of words I’ve inhabited ever since.
Continuing Your Revisions, Notes on “A Bridge to Words”
As you revise your literacy narrative, look back at “A Bridge to Words” and note the elements listed below.
Appositives
Scene
Figurative language
Gaps in memory/what the narrator doesn’t know
The story’s significance, how the writer conveys it subtly
The sections that follow focus on the elements listed above, ones you should aim to include as you continue to revise your own literacy narrative.
Appositives
Using an appositive–a group of words that renames or defines a noun or noun phrase–not only helps you develop your writing but also enables readers to better relate to your writing through the specifics that the appostives offer. Examine each of the four passages below, and note how each appositive expands on the ideas presented in the noun, the noun phrase, or the noun clause that precedes it.
Early in the essay, I write that “[m]y sister, who was three years older, had her very own news source, The Mini Page, a four-page miniature paper that arrived at our house as an insert in the Sunday edition (par. 2).
I incude another appositive to specify the gesture and the words of a family member: “I remember only the gesture and the words: someone handing me the Sunday comics and saying, “You can read part of the funny page, too. You can read Henry” (par. 3).
When I turn to an appositive again, I do so define a term that may be unfamiliar to some readers: “As the last word in the first line, ‘abhors’ serves as the lead-in to an enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause in a line break” (par. 7).
Lastly, I fashion an appostive in the conclusion to convey the significance of the memories I have recounted: “The former wakes and stretches out in my mind as a bridge to the latter: a spot in the world of words I’ve inhabited ever since” (par. 8).
Scene
With the words, “[f]inally, one Sunday,” I shift from summary to scene for the first time (par. 3). The previous paragraphs describe the reading ritual that occurred every Sunday.
Figurative Language
Instances of figurative language in the narrative include “as if covered by a shroud” (par. 1), “like links in a chain” (par. 7), and an extended metaphor in the conclusion, where I personify the comic strip Henry and The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense, depicting them as slumbering in my brain:
“Perhaps rereading Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus with my students has aroused the wordless Henry and the word-filled Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense from the corner of my brain where they’ve slumbered. The former wakes and stretches out in my mind as a bridge to the latter: a spot in the world of words I’ve inhabited ever since” (par. 8).
Directions for Writing and Posting Your Evaluations
After you have read and written notes on the two student literacy narratives, review the requirements and grade criteria on your literacy narrative assignment sheet. (Your draft is attached to that handout, and an additional copy is posted in the Major Paper Assignments folder on Blackboard.)
Determine a grade for each of the two literacy narratives, and compose a response of two or more complete sentences that includes (1) the complete title of each student literacy narrative, (2) the letter grades for each, and (3) a brief explanation of why each narrative merits the grade you assigned. Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 11:50 a.m. today, Monday, January 26.
To post your comment, click the title of the post, “ENG 1103: Model Literacy Narrative, ‘A Bridge to Words . . . ,'” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and click Comment.
I will make your evaluations visible after the 11:50 a.m. deadline.
Posting Your Literacy Narrative to Blackboard and WordPress
If we had met in person today, in the second half class, I would have taken you through the steps of posting your literacy narrative to Blackboard and WordPress. Tomorrow’s post will include step-by-step instructions. In the meantime, consider watching these YouTube videos on submitting an assignment to Blackboard and publishing a post on WordPress.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short reflective essay focusing on the process of planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative. If you are still in the process of completing your essay on Wednesday (since you have until Friday morning’s hard deadline to post it), your reflection will address your work in progress. Bring your copy of the textbook, Writing Analytically, to class.
Before class, read “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” (157-58) and “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay” (161-64). Those sections of the textbook serve as companion pieces to your writing thus far in English 1103, and reading and taking notes on those sections will prepare you to compose part of the reflective essay you will write in class on Wednesday.
After you have read and taken notes on “On Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” and “Writing from Life: The Personal Essay,” choose a phrase, clause, or sentence relevant to your writing process and draft in your journal a short passage that connects that quotation to your writing. That passage will serve as part of your reflection. Detailed instructions for composing your reflection and including your chosen quotation will be included on the handout that I distribute on Wednesday.
Previously, I published a blog post featuring playable two-letter words beginning with a, as well as a blog post featuring playable two-letter words beginning with b, d, and e. Today’ s blog post features playable two-letter words beginning with f, g, h, i, j, k, and l. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the other two-letter words in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and may increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.
fa: a tone on the diatonic scale
fe: a Hebrew letter
gi: a white garment worn in martial arts
go: a Japanese board game
ha: used to express surprise
he: a pronoun signifying a male
hi: an expression of greeting
hm: used to express consideration
ho: used to express surprise
id: the least censored part of the three-part psyche
if: a possibility
in: to harvest (a verb, takes -s, -ed, -ing)
is: the third-person singular present form of “to be”
it: a neuter pronoun
jo: a sweetheart
ka: the spiritual self in ancient Egyptian spirituality
ki: the vital life force in Chinese spirituality (also qi)
la: a tone of the diatonic scale
li: a Chinese unit of distance
lo: an expression of surprise
Notes on Last Friday’s Games
Review the games and commentaries below, and make note of the dos and don’ts.
Non-English Words and Proper Nouns
The game featured above includes a non-playable Spanish word, que, and a non-playable proper noun, the name Reid. As a rule, non-English words are not playable in English Scrabble unless they are commonly used in the English language, such as foods with origins in other countries. Do not assume that a non-English word is playable because other words that appear to be non-English are playable. For example, si is playable but not as the Spanish affirmative, which has an accent mark. Si has another meaning in English, which will be included in a later two-letter Scrabble list.
If you aren’t sure whether a proper noun, such as Reid, is also a common noun, you and your teammate will have to determine whether you are willing to take a chance on it.
S, as in Save and Strategy
In the first four plays of the game featured above, the teams played three of the four s‘s. S is a valuable letter to save for strategicuse, rather than waste on low-point words, such as shed (eight) and shop (eleven). Only the play of the third s was judicious because it earned its players thirty-three points.
Although the two blanks have a point value of zero, they are the most valuable letters in the game. Second to the blanks in value are the four s‘s, worth one point each. The high value of blanks and s’s, despite their low-point value, lies in their versatility.
Less is More
The game pictured above illustrates the benefits of playing two-letter words to increase the number of points earned in a single play. In ten turns, the two teams played a total of eight two-letter words:
ae (horizontal)
ae (vertical)
eh
er
lo
ox
ti
Ae, eh, and er are among the words defined in previous posts with two-letter word lists. Lo appears in today’s list, and ox and ti will be included in later lists.
Notably, the two teams that played the game pictured above, with a total of eight two-letter words played in ten turns, achieved higher scores than the other eight teams. Kudos to Zach Dick, Ewan Paterson, and Dylan Virga.
On Monday, we will examine sample literacy narratives. Before class, read the model narrative, “A Bridge to Words,” which is posted in Blackboard. You do not need to print a copy. I will distribute copies in class, along with copies of two student literacy narratives written in previous semesters.
Yesterday before you you began your revision work, we examined a page (pictured above) from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. That page from the first chapter serves as a valuable model for three narrative elements: summary, scene, and dialogue–at least two of which will figure in your literacy narrative.
The first paragraph of the passage summarizes the characters’ circumstances, designating the “summertime boundaries” (12) within which the narrator, Jean Louise, “Scout,” Finch, and her older brother, Jem, may play outdoors. The short one-sentence paragraph that follows continues the summary, informing readers that the summer Scout has just summarized is the one in which Dill (Charles Baker Harris) first visits Maycomb, Alabama.
With the first words of the next paragraph, “[e]arly one morning,” Scout shifts from summary to scene (12). All of the remaining paragraphs except the final one continue the scene with dialogue. Scout returns to summary with the words “Dill was from Meridian” (12).
Note that Harper Lee begins a new paragraph whenever the speaker changes. Also note that every line of dialogue does not include a dialogue tag, such as “he said” or “she said.” If a passage of dialogue includes only two speakers, none of the paragraphs require dialogue tags after the speakers’ first lines because the start of a new paragraph signals to the reader that the other person is speaking. If a dialogue includes three or more speakers–such as Scout’s conversation with Jem and Dill–occasional tags are essential.
Lessons in Punctuation
The excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird also demonstrates how to use a variety of punctuation marks, including em dashes, hyphens, and commas.
Harper Lee uses em dashes to set off “Miss Rachel’s rat terrier was expecting” (12) from the rest of the sentence because it is nonessential. It adds details, but the sentence can function without them. An em dash is used before and after phrases that are nonessential. Note that there is no space before or after the dash, which is made with two strikes of the hyphen key.
Jem asks if Dill is “four-and-a-half”? Hyphens appear between those words because multiple-word numbers are hyphenated.
Near the end of the excerpt, “Mississippi” and “Miss Rachel” (12) are both set off by commas because those details are nonessential. Commas are used to set off single words and short phrases of nonessentials the way that em dashes are used to set off longer units of words.
Work Cited
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Lippincott, 1960. p. 12.
Congratulations to Davis Smith for winning a copy of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, in yesterday’s raffle.
Today’s class will be devoted primarily to revision work. After your Scrabble debriefing and our examination of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I will return the drafts of your literacy narratives, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin revising on your laptops. You will have an additional week to continue revising before posting to Blackboard and WordPress. The due date for your literacy narrative is Wednesday, January 28, before class; the hard deadline is Friday, January 30, before class. Next Monday, January 26, I will guide you through the submission processes step by step.
As you continue to revise your literacy narrative, consider visiting the Writing Center. If you do so, you will earn five bonus points for the assignment.
To schedule an appointment, visit the Writing Center’s sign-up page, email the Writing Center’s director, Professor Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code above. To earn bonus points for your literacy narrative, consult with a Writing Center tutor no later than Thursday, January 29.
I have attached a writing notes handout to your drafts. Keep it in your portfolio and refer to it when composing assignments. I have included an additional copy of that list below.
Writing Notes
&: Do not use an ampersand (&) in place of the word and in formal writing.
Abbreviations should often be avoided in formal writing. Do not write vocab for vocabulary. On first reference, spell out Advanced Placement in the name of a course. In subsequent references, AP is acceptable.
A lot: Don’t use a lot a lot. There are a lot of better ways to express that idea, such as many, often, considerable, etc. If you use a lot in your writing, I will mark it with a d, which denotes diction or word choice.
Compound modifiers are linked with a hyphen. Write twelve-page paper, not twelve page paper.
Do: What specifically did you do? (There is almost always a stronger verb than do.) Drafted, revised, edited, reviewed, studied, and memorized are all verbs that denote a particular action. Use action verbs whenever possible.
English and the names of other languages are always capitalized. If you write English with a lower-case e, I will underscore the letter with three vertical lines. Those three lines are the proofreader’s mark that denotes the need for a capital letter.
Modifiers: Place modifiers and modifying phrases as close as possible to the words they are meant to describe. Consider this sentence: As a four-year-old, my grandmother taught me to print the letters of the alphabet. In it, the person who is four is the grandmother, which makes no sense. (She cannot be a grandmother at four.) The sentence should be revised to read something like this: As a four-year-old, I learned from my grandmother how to print the letters of the alphabet.
Numbers that can be expressed as one or two words are written as words, not figures, in MLA style, which is the style used in English courses as well as some other courses in the humanities. Write twenty-five, not 25.
Paragraphs: Business writing calls for block paragraphs, but English 1103 and many of your other classes will require you to indent the first lines of each paragraph five spaces or one-half inch.
Passive voice should often be avoided in formal writing. The subject should perform the action. Write, we read several nineteenth-century novels, not several nineteenth-century novels were read.
Separate: an easy way to remember the spelling of this often-misspelled word is to tell yourself, there’s a rat in separate.
That/Who: The relative pronoun who, not that, refers to people. (That refers to things.) Do not write He is the teacher that taught me how to develop my writing. Instead, write He is the teacher who taught me how to develop my writing.
That/This: The relative pronoun this refers to something at hand or occurring now. That class is the one you’re writing about in your literacy narrative. This class is English 1103.
Then/Than: Than is used in comparisons; then refers to a point in time.
Titles: In MLA style, the titles of book-length works are italicized. If you are writing longhand, the titles of book-length works are underlined. The titles of shorter works—such as essays, short stories, and poems—are enclosed in quotation marks.
Whether/If: Whether introduces alternatives or a choice. If introduces a condition. Write, I don’t know whether my mother or my father read to me first, and If my pen runs out of ink, I will write in pencil instead.
Occasionally, I will post additional writing notes on my blog and will include notes on diction, mechanics, and style—as well as other writing elements—in my feedback on your major writing assignments.
Journal Exercise: Alternate Portraits
The first paragraph of Petrusich’s two-paragraph short-take. The New Yorker, 12 Jan. 2026, pp. 44.
The second paragraph of Petrusich’s two-paragrpah short-take. The New Yorker, 12 Jan. 2026, pp. 44.
If you reach a stopping point in your revision before the end of the class period, begin this journal exercise. If you continue to work on your revision until the end of class, complete this exercise on your own.
Aim to explore how a writer creates an unconventional portrait of a subject by forgoing physical description and focusing on other elements, such as mood and contrast.
Directionsfor Option One
Read “Amanda Petrusich on Katy Grannan’s Photograph of Taylor Swift.”
Compose a one- or two-paragraph journal entry that addresses a detail that demonstrates how the writing develops an alternate portrait of Swift, not of her physical features but of the mood the image evokes or the now-then contrast that the writer explores.
In your journal entry, quote a word, phrase, or sentence of Petrusich’s. Introduce the quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation. See the example below.
At the end of your journal entry, include the header “Work Cited,” followed by an entry for “Amanda Petrusich on Katy Grannan’s Photograph of Taylor Swift.” See the example below. follows.
Complete your journal entry on or before Monday, February 2.
Example:
The simile that ends with the words “seismic happened” (44) could be a sentence ender. But instead, the writer, Amanda Petrusich, follows it with an appositive: a noun or noun phrase that identifies, renames, or explains it. That appositive builds on the simile and develops the sentence, offering readers a series of possible seismic events. Petrusich writes, “maybe you met a great love, or learned you were having a baby, or lost someone” (44).
Work Cited
Petrusich, Amanda. “Amanda Petrusich on Katy Grannan’s Photograph of Taylor Swift.” The New Yorker, 12 Jan. 2026, pp. 44.
Directionsfor Option Two
If you do not want to write about Taylor Swift, complete the exercise using one of your class readings. The work cited entry for each of those texts is included on the handout.
Jane Lucas 