This week, we are starting the literacy narrative project , and as you start exploring the path you wish to take I'm thinking there's a few things I could share with you to make your journey more enjoyable. There are many ways to write a literacy narrative, and these are just a few of them: Memories O ne easy way to think about writing a literacy narrative is to create an inventory of moments or memories that you feel are relevant to the story you are trying to tell. If I were to write a story about how I learned to parent kids on the Autism Spectrum, I might spend a few minutes writing a list of important moments I'd like to share with my readers. The first one would probably be the day I was told they were on the spectrum. As a student suggested in class recently, I could open my narrative with a description of the room we were in, what I saw, heard, what I was feeling, etc. and go from there. In this case, vivid description will be a tool you can use to creat...
I just finished reading Joe's " The Marriage Blog: I put a ring on it" where he reflects on the memories of his recent wedding and how social media is changing the way he remembers--the ways ALL OF US remember. I found this blog especially relevant to the (sometimes tense) discussions we've been having about identifying and exploring rhetorical problems through research, reflection and writing. Honestly, any problem that prompts us to think about the ways we communicate, is a rhetorical problem. Any problem or question that can withstand the embrace of Rhetoric , is a rhetorical problem. In this case, I'm talking about Rhetoric as a field of study , just like Math, or Chemistry, or Archaeology Think about it this way, if your Math professor asked you to identify a mathematical problem that interests you and try to solve it, what would you do? In this case, I'm asking you to identify a rhetorical problem, explore it through research, write a...
Dear Young Writers, I'm writing from Strum Hall at the University of Denver, after a day of attending lots of cool--or at least cool to me--presentations on how to create community writing projects that are reciprocal, meaningful, and promote a better, more just world. View of University of Denver campus from Strum Hall (my photo) In between sessions, I started reading your summaries of the articles, stories, and TedTalks you'll be writing about in your first blog posts. And I quickly realized that despite your uncanny ability to quickly and fairly summarize events in your life, movies, and TikToks, when you are asked to write a summary of an article, or a TedTalk in the context of a school assignment, your writing muscles inevitably tense up, and your writing becomes as stiff as my forty-four year old right knee. It's not your fault. You've been conditioned to do what you are told in school, and so your problem-solving skills are a bit rusty. The summary is but one p...
Comments
Post a Comment