Great Stuff

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This could help me with my civic literacy project

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Civic Literay

Catherine Gabor does an excellent job at breaking down and making the reader understand what civic literacy means. Having this literacy is very critical when being involved with politics. She makes valid points on how civic literacy connects to the classroom. She also shows how people can feel excluded or left out from making civic decisions. The first section of the article gave the best explanation by giving examples of people engaging in a civic discourse. This automatically guided me to the correct definition of civil literacy. At first, I didn't see how civic literacy and writing tied together. Gabor points out how civic literacy wouldn't exist without writing. People have expressed their rights through writing for a long time. The writing of The Gettysburg Address would be a prime example of using civic literacy. 

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John Swales

John Swales introduces a new way of looking at different learning communities. He admits that there will be parts of the discussion that people will not fully understand. I thought I would be able to understand it fully even if he thinks otherwise. I was dead wrong. I understand the discourse community and the speech community has similarities and significant differences. Swales argues how discourse communities are worth arguing about. He feels like people define it without thoroughness. The one part that I grasped in this reading was how he described how discourse communities all use genres. Swales assumes that we are experts on genres so he doesn't define that part. This is a very confusing article.

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Writing Across the University

Reading this selection made me think about how different guidelines and motivational factors can change how your writing will look. Glade also points out how people come to college with an idea on how to write a good paper and what guidelines you have to follow in order to do that. I like how she distinctively contrasted the rules on how to write a good paper in college and high school. I am learning how to make my writing better by identifying my strong and weak points. Glade points out that making a good paper means knowing the material, putting it on paper, and incorporating the proper themes and terms of the class. The wide range of writing assignments surprised me coming into college. Many different topics and genres made me expand my mind and think critically about stuff that I don't typically think about. The different genres are new to me coming from high school and Glade shows that I am not the only one that has to adapt to the college writing atmosphere.

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I took a section from my literacy narrative and captured the emotions felt by my best friend and I, in a newspaper article. It was drawn in my journal.

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For my high school English/Writing courses, everyone was expected to write perfect papers. If the teachers taught me one thing, it would be how they explained that the key to perfect paper is going over it and making revisions. "Shitty First Drafts" by Anne Lamott shows that successful writers across the world need more than one crack at a perfect writing just like me. Lamott explains how she has written food reviews for the California magazine and points out that she has made many mistakes and revisions to her reviews to make it as good as possible. She expresses how she is ready to give up and go back her old job when things get tough but she goes back to writing a really really shitty first draft. This article taught me that your writing gets better the more time and effort you put in it. Your first draft can be horrible, but it can turn into a five star all American story by the time your final draft comes.

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Malcolm X Learning to Read

Malcolm X is an icon for young and old African American’s who are wanting to further their education and to be able to do something in the world. In this autobiography, he shows how he learned how to read in prison. Not only does he learn how to do it, but he raises a bigger question. Do you understand what you read? He gave himself a form of literacy that was inferior to him at first. He expresses how he tried to read books that his friend in prison gives him but he does not understand most of the words and what they mean. This is what motivates him to focus and to teach himself how to understand the words that he reads. Another interesting point that I pulled from the reading would be how prison bettered him as a student and a man.

This is the point where he became the passionate speaker and reader that he aspired to be. In the reading, he points out the harsh descriptions. Back then, the prisons were much worst then what they portray today. It seems like he ducks and dodges all of the negative and focused on what he needed to in order to achieve his goal of becoming literate enough to read and write. He feels like the history has been “whitened” and that having an education gives the black man a better chance to be great.

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Sponsorship and Access

The term literacy can be defined in many different ways. Brandt uses Dora Lopez and Raymond Branch to show the steps to attain literacy in different ways. She explains how different factors influence your ability to become literate. Dora represents the people that had to work harder than a person with more opportunities and resources. She was born on a Texas border town with her grandparents working as farm laborers. If you were to guess whose literacy skill were more polished, typically people would pick Raymond because of his social standing and environmental factors. Different people have different opportunities. Raymond and Dora both took advantage of them and became their own form of literate. Raymond attained programming literacy and Dora became biliterate. They attained the knowledge that they needed to become successful. The availability of becoming literate defines an economic background and social standing of the community.

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Many people have different opinions on writers today. Trubeck has made many valid points about the writers today versus the writers in the past. He stated that people talked more than they wrote 20-30 years ago