The excerpt featured in the image above (on the far right) isn’t part of a literacy narrative; it’s a page from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. That page from Chapter One serves as a useful model for three narrative elements, at least two of which will figure in your literacy narrative. We will examine the page today in class, and I will address the page in more detail in Wednesday’s class.
After we examine the page from To Kill a Mockingbird, you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively assess the two student literacy narratives that you read for today’s class.
First, you will discuss your annotations on “Creativity is Key,” and you will collaboratively compose a brief assessment, a minimum of one complete sentence. After that, you will use the grade criteria on your literacy narrative assignment sheet to assign a grade for the essay.
Next, you will complete the steps above with the second literacy narrative, “Giving a Speech: Worst Nightmare to Best Feeling.”
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will compose a short essay that reflects on the processes of planning, drafting and composing your literacy narrative. If you do not post your essay to Blackboard and WordPress before class (you have until Friday morning to do so), you should refer to your work as ongoing.
Remember that Wednesday is the first day that you are required to bring your copy of Writing Analytically to class. In the reflection that you write in class, you will quote one relevant line from the textbook. Reviewing tomorrow’s blog post, which will include notes on quoting Writing Analytically, will ensure that you are able to effectively integrate a quotation into your essay in the allottted time.
In the previous weeks, I published blog posts featuring the 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
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review this post.
Coming Soon
On Monday, you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively assess the sample student literacy narratives that you read for class. Be sure to have your annotated copies with you, as well as your assignment sheet (attached to your draft) and be prepared to begin your assessment after your Scrabble debriefing.
Today’s blog post features my version of the second Check, Please! assignment, which you submitted at the beginning of class yesterday. In preparation for submitting your worksheet for lesson three, review this post as well as the assignment notes that I posted on January 23.
Check, Please! Lesson Two
In the second lesson of the Check, Please! Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, focuses on investigating a source, the second step in the SIFT approach, which he introduces in lesson one.
One of the most useful practices presented in lesson two is Caulfield’s follow-up to the Wikipedia strategy, which he outlined in the previous lesson. After he reviews that strategy, Caulfield explains how to use the control-f keyboard shortcut (command-f on a Mac). Typing control-f (or command-f) will open a small textbox in the upper right of the screen. Typing a word you are searching for will highlight the first appearance of the word in the text. Hitting return will highlight each subsequent appearance of the word.
Lesson two introduces the word to fauxtire, a term for websites such as World News Daily Report, based in Tel Aviv, that present themselves as satirical but in fact serve primarily to perpetuate disinformation.
Perhaps the most memorable portion of lesson two was the side-by-side comparison of the websites for the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatricians. Though at first glance the two appear comparable, using the Wikipedia strategy reveals their profound differences. While AAP is the premiere authority on children’s health and well-being, ACP was founded to protest the adoption of children by single-sex couples and is widely viewed as a single-issue hate organization.
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.
This morning, after I collect your Check, Please! worksheets for lesson two, I will return your drafts, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin revising your literacy narratives on your laptops. You will have an additional week to continue your revision work before you submit the assignment to Blackboard and publish it as a WordPress blog entry. The due date is next Wednesday, February 5 (before class). The hard deadline is Friday, February 7 (before class). Directions for submitting your literacy narrative are included on your assignment sheet and on the Blackboard submission site. I will also guide you through the submission process step by step in today’s class.
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 https://highpoint.mywconline.com, email the Writing Center’s director, Professor Justin Cook, at jcook3@highpoint.edu, or scan the QR code below. To earn bonus points for your literacy narrative, consult with a Writing Center tutor no later than Thursday, February 6.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.
Carl Thomas Anderson’s comic strip character Henry
Yesterday in class, we examined the model literacy narrative “A Bridge to Words,” and you and two of your classmates collaboratively composed a piece of writing that addressed these elements of the essay:
scene
figurative language
gaps in memory/what the narrator doesn’t know
the story’s significance–how the writer conveys it subtly
The paragraphs that follow address the elements listed above, as well an additional one to consider as you revise your literacy narrative.
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.
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:
“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).
Hillaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Twice in the essay, I use a strategy employed by Helen Keller in “The Day Language Came into My Life,” specificaly, I note what I cannot recollect. I first use that strategy when I write, “Whether it was one of my parents or my sister, I don’t know” (par. 3). I draw on it again when I write, “Why these particular early memories visit me now, I don’t know” (par. 8).
As I noted in class, there are a number of ways that I convey the significance of my experience without stating explicitly that the events were noteworthy. The vivid details of the narrative demonstrate their importance. Those details that are vivid in my mind are subsequently lifelike on the page because their significance permeates them. Both of your groups offered as examples details about my sister, Jo, reading to me from The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense. One group noted “the word ‘abhors’ . . . which appealed to me” (par. 7). The other group mentioned my “uncontrollable giggles” (par. 7).
Appositives
An appositive is a group of words that renames or defines a noun or noun phrase. Using appostives 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.
“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 (par. 2).
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).
“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).
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).
As you revise, review these notes and incorporate some of these elements into your own literacy narrative.
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, you will submit your worksheet for the second lesson in the Check, Please! course. After that, I will return your literacy narrative drafts with my notes, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin your revisions. You will have an additional week to continue to revise. The due date for posting your revison to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog is Wednesday, February 5 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, February 7 (before class).
Hillaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Today in class, we will examine the model literacy narrative “A Bridge to Words,” which you read for today, and you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose a piece of writing that addresses these elements of the essay:
scene
figurative language
gaps in memory/what the narrator doesn’t know
the story’s significance–how the writer conveys it subtly
As you continue to revise, consider the role of those elements your own literacy narrative, and ask yourself what changes may enhance them.
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. But 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.
At the beginning of class on Wednesday, you will submit your worksheet for the second lesson in the Check, Please! course. After that, I will return your literacy narrative drafts with my notes, and you will have the remainder of the class period to begin your revisions. You will have an additional week to continue to revise. The due date for posting your revison to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog is Wednesday, February 5 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, February 7 (before class).
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 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
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble, including this one.
Yesterday, at the end of class, I returned your worksheet for the first Check, Please! lesson. Before you submit your second worksheet next Wednesday, review the annotations on your first worksheet as well as the notes that follow.
A summary is a third-person objective synopsis. In the first paragraph of your assignment, your summary, you should not use first- or second-person pronouns, singular or plural. In other words, “I,” “me,” “we,” “us,” and “you” should not appear in your summary. I did not deduct points from your first Check, Please! assignment for the use of first person in your summary because I accidentally referred to first person rather than third in the instructions for the summary. However, know in the future that any summaries you write should not include first- or second-person pronouns.
Your summary should also be free of commentary. If you use such words as “effective,” “useful,” and “instructive,” you have shifted from summary to commentary. Turn to commentary in your second paragraph.
The first line of both of your paragraphs, your summary and your commentary, should be indented five spaces or one-half inch. You will not see those indentations in my blog posts because of the formatting limitations of the platform, but all of the model assignments posted for you on Blackboard adhere to the format guidelines you are required to follow.
Check, Please! is a nonprint source, which means that you do not include parenthetical citations with page or paragraph numbers (because, after all, there are no paragraphs or page numbers). Think of citing a website such as Check, Please! the way you would cite a film. Any lines that you include verbatim are enclosed in quotation marks, and the reader knows from the context that the lines are spoken in the film. The works cited entry at the bottom of the text provides the reader with the necessary source details.
Do not forget to include an MLA-style work cited entry at the end of your assignment. See the model entry on your worksheet
Not all lists require a colon. Use one only if the clause (a group of words containing a verb) that precedes the colon makes sense on its own.
Consider the difference between these two sentences with lists:
In lesson two, Mike Caulfield continues his instruction in the four-step approach to determining the reliability of a source, which he terms SIFT: (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
The steps of SIFT include (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
The second example above does not include a colon because the clause before the list does not make sense on its own.
A work cited entry has a hanging indent, which means its appearance is the opposite of a paragraph’s. The first line of a paragraph is indented five spaces or one-half inch, and the remaining lines of the paragraph are flush left. In a works cited entry, the first line is flush left, and the remaining lines are indented.
Include concrete details. Specificity not only enables the reader to see your subject, it also demonstrates to the reader that you have examined your subject carefully.
Consider the difference between the two passages below.
Lesson two includes two websites that show how similar two can be even though one is propaganda.
Perhaps the most memorable portion of lesson two is the side-by-side comparison of the websites for the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatricians. Though at first glance the two appear comparable, using the Wikipedia strategy reveals their profound differences. While AAP is the premiere authority on children’s health and well-being, ACP was founded to protest the adoption of children by single-sex couples and is widely viewed as a single-issue hate organization.
The two passages above address the same websites featured in lesson two, but the first example provides the reader with no specifics.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, look to the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts devoted to Scrabble tips.
Today in class, you will begin planning and drafting your first essay assignment, a literacy narrative, which is an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language.
Begin by asking yourself some of these questions: How have you come to think about yourself as a reader or writer? What were some of your most formative experiences as a reader or writer? What are some of the do’s and don’ts you have learned about writing? How has what you have learned about reading or writing enhanced your confidence and skill in that role? You don’t need to respond to all of those questions. Try picking one or two as a starting point, then begin bringing one of those experiences to life.
Your aim is to recreate your experience on the page and then to reflect on its significance. Your focus may be any one of the following:
a memory of a reading or writing assignment that you recall vividly
someone who helped you learn to read or write
a writing-related school event that you found humorous or embarrassing
a particular type of writing that you found (or still find) especially difficult or challenging
a memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
learning to speak a second langauage
Detailed instructions are included in the assignment handout that you will receive in class today. An additional copy of the handout is posted on Blackboard in the essay assignments folder.
Notes on Last Friday’s Quiz
Rather than posting the answers to the quiz, I am asking you to review the class notes for January 9, 10, 13, and 17 to find the answers on your own. Doing so will enable you to retain more of the course content from the first two weeks of class.
Keep in mind that one of the reasons we write is to remember. Taking notes on all of the blog entries that I publish will both engage you in learning process and enable you to demonstrate your learning in the course.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, review the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review tomorrow’s Scrabble post.
As you look ahead to your literacy narrative, consider how “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Day Language Came into My Life” demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. Together, David Sedaris‘s essay and Helen Keller’s chapter show us that the stories we recount–for our purposes, ones of learning to read or write, or speak a second language–may be humorous or serious and may consist primarily of scene or may be composed of roughly equal parts scene and summary.
Also, Sedaris’s and Keller’s stories show us two narrators whose temporal distance from their narratives differ significantly. In “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” Sedaris recounts struggling to learn French “[a]t the age of forty-one” (166). His essay was published in Esquire magazine when he was forty-three, which means that he was chronicling an experience only two years in his past. In contrast, Keller writes of the life-altering experience of learning sign lanaguage “three months before I was seven years old” (par. 1), more than fifteen years before she published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903). The term for a narrator such as Keller is adult retrospective narrator.
As an adult, Keller places the reader in the world of darkness she inhabited as a young child, but that childhood experience is informed by her adult perspective: “I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it [the arrival of my teacher] connects” (par. 1). Keller depicts herself as a girl of almost seven, learning her first sign-language words from Annie Sullivan, but Keller’s observations about that experience are ones that could only come from an adult.
Sometimes students choose not to write about experiences in the distant past because they don’t think they remember enough about incidents that occurred long ago. Know that the more you write about a memory, the more likely you are recall sensory details that pull you back to that moment–and those same sensory details will place readers in that moment with you when you recreate it on the page. Also know that what you don’t remember can become part of your story, just as what Keller doesn’t remember becomes part of her story in these lines: “I learned a great many new words that day. I don’t remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them” (par. 9).
Works Cited
Keller, Helen. “The Day that Language Came into My Life.” The Story of My Life. Pine Valley Central School, https://www.pval.org/cms/lib/ NY19000481/Centricity/ Domain/105/The%20Day%20Language%20Came%20into%20my%20Life.pdf.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.
Tomorrow, at the beginning of class, I will collect your worksheets for the first Check, Please! lesson. If you were absent on the day that I distributed copies of the worksheet or you have misplaced your copy, download the file from Blackboard and print it.
My sample assignment for lesson one appears below, as well as on the worksheet, itself.
Check, Please! Lesson One
In the first lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at Washington State University’s Center for an Informed Public, introduces the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source: (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
One of the most useful practices presented in lesson one is what the author terms the “Wikipedia Trick.” Deleting everything that follows a website’s URL (including the slash), adding a space, typing “Wikipedia,” and hitting “enter” will yield the site’s Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia entry that appears at the top of the screen may indicate the source’s reliability or lack thereof.
The most memorable segment of lesson one is the short, riveting video “The Miseducation of Dylann Roof,” which begins with the narrator asking the question, “How does a child become a killer?” Produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, it documents how algorithms can lead unskilled web searchers down paths of disinformation. In the worst cases, such as Roof’s, algorithms can lead searchers to the extremist propaganda of radical conspiracy theorists.
Check, Please! worksheets are designed to be handwritten, and I prefer for you to complete them by putting pen to paper. If, however, you wish to type them, you are required to follow MLA style manuscript guidelines. See the sample file posted in the Check, Please! folder on Blackboard.
Next Up
Tomorrow’s class will be devoted to planning and drafting your literacy narratives. Next Wednesday, January 29, I will return your handwritten drafts with my notes, and you will have the class period to begin revising your narratives on your laptops and tablets. After that class, you will have an additional week to continue your revision work. The due date for posting your revisions to Blackboard and to your WordPress blogs is Wednesday, February 5 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, February 7 (before class).
Jane Lucas 