For this assignment, my task was to write a literacy narrative about how my identity has affected my relationship with literacy. I decided to write about my experience witnessing my mom work as a cleaning lady and how it motivated me to pursue a higher education. I knew writing about my mom was the best way to approach this essay because no one else has had a greater impact on my educational development than her. Although one of the hardest things for me to do during this writing process was limiting my essay to three pages, writing this essay helped me improve my revisioning skills and gave me practice in collaborating with other people through peer review.

This literacy narrative was written with the intent to inform readers about my journey with reading and writing, specifically in the context of school, and why my relationship with education changed in the first place. Although my essay can be read by anyone, the main audience that my essay targets are people of low-income, children of immigrant parents, or simply people who share a similar motive behind doing well in school. I wrote this essay because I felt that it was necessary to share my story of learning why the value of education is so important. I believe everyone in the United States should learn to respect the value of education as well, which is a message that I hoped to spread through my essay. Since this was a narrative, it was written from my point of view and was mostly subjective and informal.

I was able to share my rough draft with some of my classmates and receive feedback from them. We used text messages and emails to send each other our reviews. The peer reviews I received helped me improve my essay tremendously and showed me that there was still a lot of room for improvement. For example, one of my classmates pointed out to me that my first rough draft lacked a clear topic sentence in the introduction. This feedback influenced me to add a topic sentence which helped make my narrative easier to understand.

One of the things I struggled with while writing my essay was staying within the word limit. A certain peer review that I received told me that my essay was too long and that I needed to shorten it. Towards the end of my writing process, I learned that the key to staying within the word limit, while still being detailed in my essay, is being concise in my sentences. After revising my essay a few times, I realized that there were many parts of my sentences that were unnecessary or repetitive. It took me a bit of practice before getting accustomed to shortening sentences and deleting unnecessary ones. For example, if two consecutive sentences in my essay conveyed the same idea, I would either delete one of them or try combing the main points from each of the two to create a single, shorter sentence.

This essay was definitely a unique writing experience because it required me to think back to the origins of my relationship with literacy, which stretches back to my early childhood, and analyze how it has been impacted by my social identity. Writing this literacy narrative taught me how to improve my revisioning skills by forcing me to be more concise in my sentences and selective with my words choices. Finally, this writing process exposed me to a more collaborative approach to writing a narrative, which included giving and receiving peer reviews—a strategy that helped me improve my essay in ways that I could not have done on my own. I now look forward to employing the rhetorical devices I learned and collaborating with others in all of the future essays that I write.

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