WRT 150

Hang He

2/15/2013

Literacy Timeline:

            At first glance I saw this topic, I felt no difficult to me because there were some many literacies in my mind that I wanted to express. Actually, I cannot remember the details of most memories.  However, I do remember the exciting parts of these memories. Some important memories will stay in people’s mind for live. It does not matter if I remembered the details; all I need to do is just expressing what I felt, what I thought and what I did at that time.  Nonetheless, I had a really hard time to get everything on paper because there was so much. I have many learning literacies I can talk about, such as how I learned Chinese and how I learned digital literacy. As professor suggest to my Chinese friends and me, I decided to write the literacy about how I learned English and went abroad to here. I thought this literacy would be more meaningful at this time.

            One thing surprised me was when I try to write the timeline, many details were naturally surge to my mind. Meanwhile, many of these memories I thought I already forget about them, but when I sat in front of my desk, they just emerge. Actually it was a fun time for me to write the timeline, because I recollect lots of fun childhood memories.

            I did notice theme throughout my timeline. Before I started to write the timeline, I already decided to write the theme that how I go abroad. Because the theme which is how I go abroad deeply related my English experience. I felt confused when I first look the Timeline Guideline. However, after I decided to write about how I learn English, the first idea about the theme came to my mind is how I come to U.S. And I decided to write about it without hesitation for even one second.

            When I recollected the memories and wrote them down, I was considering how to write the Literacy narrative essay at the same time. Unexpectedly, I recollected some words my mother told me before, and I was following what she said. I really admire my mother and I think she is a woman full with wisdoms. Every Chinese New year, my mother will give me some words as gifts while the others children got new clothes and toys. I was mad at that before, but now I treated these words as the biggest treasure to me.

Literacy Narrative

            After I suffered a hard time to choose theme and literacy when I started to write timeline, I already had a clear way for my literacy narrative. I had couple ideas for narrative when I was writing the timeline. Meanwhile, when I was writing the literacy narrative, more and more new ideas were keeping jumping out at me. The two key ideas for my narrative were my Europe travel experience and my high school English teacher. And after I started my narrative, there were more ideas jumped out at me to help me related two key ideas and made the narrative more impressive.

            I did not consider how to organize my narrative although it read chronologically. It was difficult to organize my thoughts into the draft. The most annoying thing was every time I finished a paragraph or wrote down my ideas; there were some better ideas which conflict with my old idea jumped out. So it was really hard to choose did I need keep the old one or rewrote a new one. For the prewriting strategies, I never do that on purpose. I will simply write down whatever I come up with and then revise it again and again.

            After the peer review, I noticed that the summary was horrible. I realized that when I was writing, but I did not notice it was this horrible before my partner told me. “Another set of eyes” is a really helpful method. People will follow what they think when they are revising. As a result, it is hard to find those tiny errors. But partners as an audience, when they feel uncomfortable in reading some sentences, that probably means there might be an error. So it is really helpful.