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Donald Stanley III English 141 Swartz 9/17/2012

My 1,167 Words About Literacy Reading and writing have always been ever changing subjects in my life. Every aspect in which I am related to them has changed over the years, from my skill level, to my attitude towards them, and beyond. My interests in reading and writing have developed and changed dynamically over time; my proficiency growing and expanding steadily in parallel. The perpetually predictable pattern of changing interests comes directly out of my own identity as an occasional procrastinator, an affliction that I have struggled to combat, but havent quite got around to defeating. In contrast, my natural talent in usage of the English language is a development stemming out of the actions of my parents and their vigilance in ensuring the literacy of their child from an early age.

My earliest memory of the concept of reading is the classic bedtime story scenario. As a young child I loved to lay snuggled under the blankets, all warm and cozy, and be read to by my father or mother just before lights out. My favorite author and illustrator was easily Eric Carle, an artistic genius whos brainchildren include some of my favorite childrens books of all time, including: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?, and The Grouchy Ladybug. These nighttime adventures in hand-painted collage continued until I entered elementary school, and began to learn how to read proficiently on my own. When I

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started kindergarten, Scholastics book order campaign became the solid foundation on which I built my literacy. Every time the opportunity arose, I ordered the next red box in the set of their phonics series. Each glorious cube contained a collection of short stories, a cassette tape, and a scavenger hunt. In all honesty, I only really wanted to listen to the tapes and read along to search each story for the hidden golden key to place the included sticker on it, but that was only a ruse thought up by the series creators to submit me to reading, and it certainly worked. I was hooked, and all along those little adhesive-backed skeleton keys were really the keys to my literacy. The skills I gained through these kindergarten escapades in reading led me to truly enjoy picking up and reading books of all kinds, an activity that I have partaken in ever since, though in intervals.

My struggle with reading has always been the fact that I easily fall out of it. If I become sidetracked or my school schedule becomes too full of extracurricular activities to find time to finish the book that I am in the process of reading, I will stop reading entirely and not read any other substantial work until I am able to finish the work that was originally interrupted. Due to the frustration of starting the work all over to re-attain all of the forgotten details, these hiatuses can often last for weeks, or even months, depending on the length of the book. The most recent occurrence of this that comes to mind, was when I began reading the novel Enders Game by Orson Scott Card in late spring of 2012. With both the beginning practices for soccer and studying for final exams on my plate, I stopped reading the book nearly halfway through, failing to finish it until the second week of September, 2012, with no structured reading activities in between. Upon finally completing Enders Game, I began chugging along through books once more at a fairly steady pace, and am still reading every day as of September 20th, 2012.

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My experiences with writing differ greatly from those with reading, in that I showed little interest in it at a young age and began to write much later. Clear through elementary school, I absolutely dreaded the thought of being forced to put pencil to paper and assemble sentences with dull and emotionless graphite lines. Whenever any form of writing assignment was assigned, I felt as if I had been conscripted and would be held for a dozen millennia in a prison of writers block and carpal tunnel syndrome. While first learning to write, I struggled with the concept of brainstorming and coming up with ideas. For the first eight years of my formal schooling, my writing process consisted of spewing any and all ideas onto the paper as they came to mind, turning it in as a final copy, and hoping for the best. As I transitioned into high school, I began to better understand the writing process, as well as what methods of brainstorming and pre-writing worked best for me. The fruits of my labor came in the form of more organized writings, comfort in being assigned a writing project, and overall a more rich enjoyment of the writing process.

My true embrace of the excitement one can get out of writing came in English Two Honors my sophomore year of high school. The largest portion of the year was spent reading Tolkiens Lord of the Rings trilogy; analyzing and responding to each individual chapter. This not only improved my writing skills by letting me see the storys overall structure through the authors point of view, but also enhanced my enjoyment of reading by giving me more insight as to how events carry through a story, and how to look past the literal meanings of the ideas on the page into their deeper representative meanings. All this analysis of Tolkiens Lord of the Rings epics built up into our largest writing assignment of the year, the first chapter of what was to be our own heroic epic. After pre-writing my ideas for the first three chapters and loosely

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outlining the storys main plot devices as a whole to see how my opening would fit with the rest of the novel, I typed the eight pages that would make up the first chapter of Two Betrayals. Dreaming up this story, organizing my ideas, and molding them together in Microsoft Word was the most comfortable and pleasant experience that Ive ever had with the writing process.

Overall, I can say that my literacy was very unstructured coming out of the gate, given the fact that I had a love for reading, but on the other side took much displeasure in being forced to write. The two had no room to overlap at all. With my entrance into high school, my interest in writing was sparked; the new, more mature style of classes allowing me to meld the two dimensions of my literacy into a more effective middle ground where I can comfortably enjoy both. To me, the most important aspect of improving ones attitude toward literacy is freedom. My gripes with writing disappeared when I was no longer forced to abide by strict codes and fill in seemingly useless pre-writing charts and worksheets. The most effective way to be successful with literacy, and more importantly enjoy it, is to be do it ones own way. I read what interests me, and I write what I feel.