Abstract

In the Language and Literacy Narrative, we had to select a key moment in our lives relating to language or literacy. We had to detail this moment creatively, as well as write more objectively about its social significance and what it can teach us about language and literacy in our society.

Language and Literacy Narrative

At the front of the room, you’re the only one standing, while everyone else is seated. Somehow, you feel even smaller. You’re very good at being small. Your voice crackles as you pull words out of every orifice but your mouth, and it feels wrong. A statistic you don’t quite understand comes out of your ear and you feel it start to burn and inflate, filling your head until you feel like you can’t stand up anymore. A citation spills out your nose, dripping like tar and stinging like ice. It slips up and down your throat, scratching and clawing its way out as you struggle to pull it out of your chest. It comes out, and you pray to God it’s over, until you realize you’ve been speaking—if you can even call it that—for hardly a minute. The residual tar cackles in your lungs, but the crowd hears it as a child about to cry.

Every time it comes up, people pat your shoulder condescendingly and insist that you tried your best, but you know you didn’t. You know it’s meant to sound positive, but all you hear is that a near-panic attack is the best you can do. On the day they release the topics for the next competition, you’re immediately at your computer, beginning to write speeches.

The research portion of it is the same as always, and it comes pretty naturally. The foreign part is the speech itself. The other students you listened to spoke in forbidden tongues, like the first person, or a passive voice, things you’d never known to be permitted. If you could sit down and read their papers, it would look terrible. You try to visualize their foreign phrasings on paper, and you realize that this is just an exercise of your imagination; speeches aren’t meant to be read. You don’t need to follow the rules.

Over the course of the rest of the year, you keep writing speeches, attending competitions and even making it to the state finals. What you take away from the experience, however, is not just the importance of persistence, but also how strange it was to succeed with such unconventional writing. Saying your opinions out loud is foreign enough, but having them listened to? Having people seriously consider them, respond to them, and ask you about them? You know that it’s not real, it’s just for a competition. Still, it feels good, having this illusion of importance.

All the writing you’ve done up until now has followed strict rules laid out by teachers and parents, each saying to never use personal pronouns, never make it about you, only write what’s expected, keep it impersonal. Don’t bother with having opinions, and if it’s an argumentative paper, write whatever perspective you think will get you a better grade, even if you don’t believe in it. They phrased it like it was a professional, sophisticated choice, and you nodded along, even though you thought that sounded an awful lot like lying. Somehow, even calling it that feels too personal for these papers, which give nothing to the world but a grade.

Writing these speeches, however, feels meaningful. You won’t get a grade for any of them, but they feel like the most important pieces of writing you’ve done in your life. Sometimes they still say to write for whichever side will earn you more points, but that just means taking the stance you can speak more passionately about. By the end of your time in that club, you can only recall speaking what you believed in.

You still have trouble writing non-academic papers. That’s why you wrote this personal story in the second person; you can’t be sure, but you think it’s because you’re still scared to talk about yourself because you were never trained to think you deserve a say. Writing about your opinions is one thing, but writing about yourself is another thing entirely, a boundary set up by your old teachers you still can’t quite get over.  However, you choose to be positive; you’ve overcome one hurdle they put up, so there’s no reason you can’t do it again with a little effort.

Still, I can’t help but think about every student who would’ve given up, who never had that revelation that they can say something that matters. The essays we write in middle school are pointless formats, meant only to fill a grade and not to encourage discussion. This left me wildly unprepared for the world, and I doubt I’m a special case. If I hadn’t been in such a special circumstance, I would’ve never learned how to speak argumentatively, and it burns to think how many students have this chance ripped from them, to no one’s benefit.

Cover Letter

I really struggle with writing personal narratives, and I have for as long as I can remember. Writing my snapshot, which became the prelude to my final narrative, was painful to say the least. It wasn’t until the assignment to rewrite the snapshot in a second or third person perspective that I really felt the story taking shape. While most others divulged that it was difficult to write, I found that it came more naturally to me, and the majority of my narrative became not just written in second person, but also about my writing in the second person in general. I forced myself to think about why I preferred writing like that, and once I realized that it was because of poor experiences with writing assignments in the past, I also forced myself to write my final paragraph in the first person; it felt hypocritical and stagnant to write an entire piece about being kept from writing in the first person only to avoid it altogether.

This final paragraph in the first person also helped me build my second point, the social significance. Learning how to connect my experiences to some realm greater than myself, I found, was an exercise in considering my rhetorical situation; I found the significance in my purpose, which was to basically complain about how I’d been taught to write. Thinking more deeply about what I was writing gave way to how I could improve it, both in what I wrote and how I wrote it.