Due: Wednesday, September 29
In addition to your revised draft of the literacy narrative, you will for Wednesday’s class compose and publish a writer’s letter to our course blog: one in which you reflect on the revision process and identify tangible ways in which you have redrafted your piece, building on the insights of peer review, course content, large-group discussion, and/or office hours meetings.
I’ll leave this prompt relatively open given that you make a concerted effort to name, articulate, and reflect on how precisely you have revised your paper, as well as where you plan to go from here. Accordingly, please do remember that you can submit updated versions of your literacy narrative at any point in the semester, which will overwrite your previous grade and offer you another round of constructive feedback from yours truly.
Guided Questions
Adapted from my prompts for peer review our last class, I invite you to use these guided questions as a point of departure for composing your writer’s letter.
Ask yourself, then, do your revisions…
- … work toward more descriptive, world-building prose?
- serve to texture your narrative with figurative language, rather than depending too much on abstractions?
- work to narrate a more related series of events to build more suspense or intrigue, driving your narrative forward?
- better orient readers to a sense of time across your narrative?
- aim to express the relationship and dependencies of your memories over and across time?
- frame a more “inhabitable” narrative space, setting, or environment, where the reader can imagine themselves as they move through your story?
- more vividly describe a time when you joined in the conversation of a discourse community?
- integrate more realistic dialogues or impactful exchanges to ground your reader and to demonstrate interactions between you and other figures in your piece
- help visualize how you might practically imagine yourself achieving further growth in the near and distant future?
- flesh out some of the imaginative possibilities on which you might base your futures thinking?
- gesture toward joining new communities, engaging with other unknown modes of discourse, or serving as a literacy sponsor for others like you in the near and distant future?