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Zach Walsh
Ms. Caruso
UNWRT 1101
Ms C
UNWRT 1101
May 20, 2014
Literacy Memoir Original
I have always loved reading since I was little kid but hated writing because I have
never been great at getting my thoughts down on paper for English classes. However for
lab reports and posters I can write those in a night. I feel that people should know that
when it comes to writing down concrete ideas that I have not only come up with but also
experienced physically I am more than adept at writing those. I can crank out a 15-page
lab report on a lab experiment that took more than a month to perform in less then 24
hours and get a good grade on it. When it comes to English papers however I struggle to
write a 5 page one. It doesnt help that its been almost 4 years since I have written an
English paper for a class.
I consider myself literate in several fields but the ones I consider most literate are
Spanish, Phlebotomy (process of taking blood and the study of it), emergency medicine
and sports. I feel that I am an expert in these fields because I can speak their languages
fluently. I can operate in those fields and interact with professionals and know what I am
doing and not have to ask them basic questions but questions that are more deep and
thoughtful. I am working on my fluency of writing papers and being a better student. I
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say that I am working on these because I cant write a good paper and I am usually
unprepared for class as a student but I am working on changing this.
My writing process is one that is severely flawed in that I typically wait until the
night before my papers are due to write them. I start out in the early evening by writing
down an outline of what I want my overall paper to look like then I do my research to
find my sources. After finding my sources I then proceed to start writing my paper and I
dont stop until I am finished with it. I typically then look back over the paper and make
some small changes but most times I dont have enough time to make major changes to
my paper. The one thing that I know I need to change about how I write my papers
is that I need to start them before the night that they are due. By starting them
earlier I would give myself more time to work on my papers and revise them so that
my ideas are clear. Writing would be easier for me if I were passionate about the
subject I was writing about.
I feel that this semester will help me improve my writing process and help me to
get my point across in papers that I write. I am aggravated that I have to take this class
because it has been 3 years since I had to take an English class and I thought I was done
with my English requirements when I transferred here. At Wofford College I was done
with my English requirements and that was one of my happiest moments. I hope that this
class wont be like my previous classes where I struggled and apparently my opinion was
always wrong. At first I definitely did not want to be in this class because I thought
every paper would be graded and not that our grades would reflect how we have
developed as a writer through the semester. After hearing that I felt slightly relieved
about being in the class.
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Literacy Memoir Response to someone else
Throughout this novel I feel that the writer has given a master narrative in that the
response to it overall is broad and does not address specific topics and go into deep detail
although the writer does address her issues but on a more surface level. She is more
specific about her experiences communicating and how its one of her weaknesses in the
classroom but not outside of a classroom setting. The author goes into some deeper detail
while explaining why its hard for them to speak up in class and gives their personal
thoughts on why that is.
This writer to me comes off as the Success archetype in that they have always
appreciated and liked writing since a young age. The writer was home schooled and was
tutored in writing and spelling at a higher-grade level than what they were actually at.
They were writing at a 2
nd
grade level while they were 4 years old and learned with her
cousin. As they got older and moved to Asheville the writer became even more open-
minded and saw the importance of literacy and how everyone should be treated equally.
The writer is willing and open to learning more about literacy and writing because to
them it will help them become the best teacher that they can possibly be. Their writing
process reflects this in that as soon as they have an idea they jot it down on their phone so
they dont forget that idea. From there the author then begins to construct and fit the
ideas together to form the paper that they are writing.
This writer is definitely values growing as a writer in every area possible and is
excited about it. While this is important and will be beneficial to them they are also
missing out on focusing on one area or aspect of their writing to improve vastly on. So as
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a whole their writing will improve but their various areas will only develop a little bit as
opposed to growing by a vast amount.
This writers piece definitely comes across as a piece that had a lot of thought and
time put into it and is well constructed. This tells me that the writer has a good writing
process and puts thought into how they go about constructing their papers. It tells me
that they approach literature the same way in that they will observe the whole part of
what they are looking at before they begin to construct an idea of what they want to write
about.
By thinking that they are just an average writer and not creative this author is
limiting himself or herself from becoming a great writer. They need to believe in
themselves that they can be great writer and creative. Those negative thoughts are part of
what prevents them from becoming a creative and good writer. By thinking they are an
average writer thats how they are going to write. My advice for this writer over the
semester is to change their mindset about being an average writer because to me they
come off as a good writer. To help out with the creativity they should go somewhere
outside of their house and classroom to form those creative thoughts. I know that they
arent one to sit down for hours and work so they should go on walks or be outside while
brainstorming their ideas and record them in their phone. Once they have their ideas they
should then go and sit down and start writing.
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Literacy Memoir Self Assessment
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In my literacy memoir my tone was a combination of genuine and thinking that it
was a waste of time. The reason why I felt that this assignment was a waste of time was
that Im frustrated I have to take another English class. If I hadnt felt this way then I feel
that my memoir would have truly contained a genuine tone and that it would have gone
into more detail and depth. The reason why I approached this assignment with some
hesitation is that its been several years since I have had to write a paper about something
other than a disease or a lab report. Writing about myself is something that I havent
done before and I was nervous about doing it since I am not a very open person. If I
approach all of my other assignments like this then my grades will suffer because that
hesitation prevents me from performing my best work. I will have to struggle and force
myself to overcome this hesitation if I want to do well and submit the best work that I am
capable of doing.
After reading Bains work I feel that I am a mix of deep and surface learner. It all
depends on what class I am in. For instance math, which I am not very interested in, I am
a surface learner in that I will memorize the equations and learn how to do certain
problems but I dont care about understanding how it all works. However in my sciences
classes that deal with medical things like my Physiology class I am a deep learner. In
that not only do I memorize how everything works but also I want to know why and how
each and everything works like hormones for example. In that class I wanted to know
how does each hormone affect not only a specific organ but the body as a whole and what
happens to that hormone in different situations such as a hemorrhage. This mix reflected
itself in my memoir because English is one of those classes that I am not passionate about
so I will do what is required but I dont enjoy doing it.
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If I had to give myself a grade I would give myself a B. I would give myself a B
because I felt that I did give an above average attempt at fully opening up but there are
definitely areas that I could have opened up more than I did. I did everything that I
needed to on the rubric and went into some detail for all of the things but not deep
enough to warrant an A. For instance when I talk about other fields that I am literate in I
couldve been more detailed on how I was fluent in those fields and given specific
examples. I would approach this assignment differently in the future with the thought
that doing it would help me to become a better writer and by doing it that way I would
not only achieve a better grade but it would seem more worthwhile to me.
Looking over character archetypes I fall into 2 of them, the victim and the rebel. I
feel that I am the victim because I have always enjoyed reading other peoples writings. I
never enjoyed writing but I didnt hate it either until I got to high school. In high school I
had an English teacher my sophomore year who was very sexist and hated everything and
anything that a male student wrote in her class. On top of that she didnt like me as a
person and because of her I started to dislike writing more and more. Im also the rebel
in that I hate having to meet certain requirements like page length. I feel that if I can get
everything that I want and need to down on paper in less space/pages than is required
than I shouldnt waste the teachers time by writing in a bunch of filler just to meet a
length requirement. I think that this comes from me having a more scientific style of
writing in that I am used to having to write down everything that is important on only a
poster or in a lab report, which have limited space on them.
In my literacy memoir I feel that I wanted to make it clear that I didnt want to be
in another English class but while I dont want to be in it I am going to give my best
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effort and that I am looking forward to improving myself as a writer. I also wanted to
make it clear that I know my writing style has many faults and that I acknowledge that I
have them and that I will be working on improving and changing them this semester. I
feel like these ideas were there in my memoir but they werent as clear as they could have
been.
I feel that I have gotten to where I am today as a writer due to an English tutor in
high school who really helped me form an approach to writing an essay including how to
start out with an outline and then slowly move on from there. Some of my high school
teachers hindered me in that part of my grade on a paper was based on word count and
page length, which I hated. I never understood why they would want to me to write a 10
page paper when I could get all my thoughts and ideas out on 8 pages. Then in college it
was more of my science classes that really had a profound effect on my writing style in
that I was always a succinct writer but I became more so due to my science classes where
I had limited time on short answers on tests and lab posters had to fit on one page. These
limitations really helped fine-tune and make me better at getting my point across in very
few words. I feel that I left out my scientific and medical background in my literacy
memoir and these experiences would help show why I dont like to write a lot. In science
there is only so much that you can say about a certain disease or a lab that was performed
or a medical procedure. These are things that I enjoy doing and by leaving them out I left
out why I like to write succinctly and not a significant amount. In my memoir I
acknowledged my successes and my failures because leaving one of those out doesnt
show the whole story about my writing life. I acknowledged my failures because there
are many of them and by not acknowledging them I prevent myself from growing and
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learning from them. I have learned from my failures in that I used to never write out an
outline and find sources before I started writing but now I do and I have found that
writing papers is easier that way. I wish I had learned that a long time ago. My memoir
was a Master narrative and I didnt use to write like that. It was in high school when I
was told that I was extremely detailed, sometimes a little to much and that I needed to
broaden out more to write the bigger picture. That reflects itself in my memoir because I
could have been a lot more detailed in the examples that I gave such as phlebotomy being
something that I am fluent in along with Spanish.