Project 1 was my first experience for constructing a literacy narrative in a very long time. Although I have had basic experiences with these types of assignments in high school, I never had to apply these concepts in college writing. Thus, I can describe writing my first literacy narrative experience as extremely difficult to grasp due to my loss of familiarity with these kinds of writing. From my inability to completely understand this assignment, I was not confident during many periods of writing my narrative. There was a feeling inside of me telling me that I was doing something wrong which inhibited me from expressing my thoughts in a clear manner.
One of the first aspects that I found difficult when writing my literacy narrative was understanding the fundamentals. Starting the essay was strenuous as I had a difficult time on deciding whether to write about my personal experience and opinions or to describe in analytical detail on what academic writing is. However, I did learn that the narrative should have contained a little bit of both. I had a hard time combining these two aspects as I had always been writing technically, without any personal expressions, during my college career. Another aspect I found difficult was backing my claims using evidence from my own work. Throughout my college career, I have had many experiences backing up my work with evidence from other texts or articles. As a matter of fact, I became comfortable with finding relevant evidence and explaining how it connects to my claim. However, finding relevant evidence from my own work was difficult as I wasn’t able to describe how it related to my claims. I couldn’t express the proper ideas to fit my evidence in the essay and explain its relevance. Hence, these were the two most difficult aspect I found when writing a literacy narrative.
Due to my inability to come to class from personal reasons, I was unable to take part in peer reviews. However, the annotated bibliography helped a lot as it gave me a basic understanding on how I should approach my narrative. The bibliography provided a better understanding of the topic and provided evidence that can be used to support most of my claims. It also helped me understand the articles better as I was able to recognize the author’s main points and how he or she described academic writing. As a result, from using the bibliography, I was able to organize my claims and opinions in a way that described academic writing while also sharing personal opinions and experiences.
Nice job articulating the challenges of this assignment. Keep in mind that quoting your own work to support a claim is exactly the same move as quoting the work of others. You make a statement about your success as a writer based on the definition of academic writing that you have explored, you include a relevant quote from a piece of writing you’ve done, you explain how that quote proves your success (or lack thereof), and you make the connection between your explanation and your larger point. On the whole, your draft is strong and puts you in a good place to revise!