literacy essay

201 Literacy Essay Topics & Examples

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• The Importance of Literacy Essay (Critical Writing) Literacy is a skill that is never late to acquire because it is essential for education, employment, belonging to the community, and ability to help one’s children.
• Literacy Definition and Importance Literacy is the process of learning whereby an individual gains the ability to understand and convey written information, gain new skills from the information, teach those skills and apply the acquired knowledge and skills for […]
• The Concept and Importance of Information Literacy In fact, Information Literacy is far much better than these concepts because it stands ahead, gives the ability to think outside the box and not only gives the access to the knowledge but also the […]
• Thematic Cross-Curricular Approach Toward Literacy Learning It has been recommended for schools to pay closer attention to the needs of teachers in planning a thematic curriculum and facilitate the establishment of policies that will help support teachers and their students in […]
• Multi-Literacy, Its Types and Characteristics Thus, students are to be taught not only literacy skills but also the identification of alterations in the patterns of meaning depending on the context. For instance, they are to be aware of the main […]
• Hypodermic Syringe Model and Media Literacy A person’s media competence can be developed starting from an early age, and it is the responsibility of parents and teachers to control media influence on children and teach them to use mass media to […]
• Defining Literacy Concept The final type of literacy is health literacy that evaluates how well one can comprehend and use health-related information to make health-related decisions.
• Children’s Literature in Literacy Education The primary aim of the paper is to provide the in-depth analysis regarding the role of the children’s literature in the literacy education.
• Visual Literacy: Definition and Impact Both Dondis and Kennedy agree that visual literacy enhances meaning and understanding of what one sees and the way one lives.
• How Information Literacy Affects Nursing Informatics in the 21st Century With the discovery of technology and the availability of applications that supports healthcare, there has been a positive shift in information literacy. In conclusion, nursing informatics has been one of the best ways of supporting […]
• Literacy Skills Development in Children In this essay, the focus will be to discuss the most appropriate approach for a teacher to facilitate the learning of literacy skills among children.
• The Connection between Literacy, Education and New media This relationship is viewed to continue growing stronger as more educational institutions incorporate the use of new media in the literacy development and educational practices.
• Retelling as a Literacy Assessment Retelling is the effective tool to assess the students’ comprehension of the text while reading with references to understanding the order of events and key points of the story.
• Literacy Through iPads in Early Education In the article, Beschorner and Hutchison, note that in the 21st century, children gain access to written language very early due to the use of digital devices.
• Promoting Literacy to Students: The Challenges and the Solutions Thus, basing the research on the theory of phonetic awareness, one can presume that the roots of low literacy rates are going to be found and that the most efficient means of improving literacy rates […]
• Literacy Development in Personal Experience The author encouraged me to use writing as a medium to express ideas and knowledge in a way that I would want it to be presented to me. A significant step towards the improvement of […]
• Role of Teachers in Literacy Education The current essay shows why a qualified teacher is critical in literacy programs and examines three factors that can improve student outcomes. There is a large variety of approaches, techniques, and strategies that can improve […]
• Reading and Literacy of the Students In order to motivate the students so that they may be engaged for the rest of the day, I begin the class with a general discussion of the latest issue that is making headlines either […]
• Indian Women’s Technology Access and Literacy Nevertheless, the gender divide in technological access is substantially lower in the developed countries. Leggon stated, “the divide is more than as issue of access to technology; it is also an issue of use and […]
• Financial Literacy: The Importance in the Modern World Hence, it is necessary to learn the fundamentals of financial literacy from a young age in order to have a carefree retirement, emergency funds, and protection against inflation.
• The What’s Hot in Literacy Survey Results As a future teacher, I would like to express solidarity with the report’s authors and the topics they covered, especially considering that not all children have at least a primary education to develop literacy. This […]
• Archetypes in Lyrics: Finding Literacy in Song This turn of the story is unexpected because the text of the first two verses is cheerful, and the motive and melody of the composition have a fast and joyful mood.
• Shared Reading as a Literacy Strategy Reading strategy involves determining mental actions that learners take when they are reading to assist them to build and maintain the meaning of what they would be reading.
• Informal Reading Inventory as Literacy Assessment To assess the student’s ability to recognize words and determine the reading level, it is necessary to use graded word lists and graded text passages to conduct the informal reading inventory.
• The Literacy Night Activity Observation It is important to note that literacy is not limited only to reading and writing because there are key elements of being able to share ideas as well.
• Health Literacy in Hemodialysis Patients Namely, the guide written by the US Department of Health and Human Services focuses on the online aspect of distributing valuable information to the population groups.
• Media Literacy and Critical Thinking Skills Media literacy implies an understanding by the audience of the basic principles of the work of the media, including the search for the necessary information, understanding the principles of the formation of messages by different […]
• Media Literacy Amongst Children To equip children and the young generation with relevant knowledge and provide them with the necessary tools to understand the present media landscape and be critical informers.
• Important Moment in Literacy Development Journey My inability to understand became sore when my parents and teachers determined that I needed to remain in the second grade to improve my comprehension skills.
• Health Literacy in the Modern Digital Age Although the dynamic of doctor-patient interaction changed due to the abundance of online resources, its downside may be the spread of false and scientifically unsupported information, resulting in damage to people’s health.
• Health Literacy: Using Patient Portals Aside from needs assessments, I would create teaching materials to provide the staff with ideas on how to offer accommodations for low- and medium-literacy portal users.
• Importance of Health Literacy for Human Health Thus, the paper addresses the lack of attention to the public sector and the absence of innovative approaches in the administration of the policies.
• Development of Emergent Literacy in Young ESL Learners In the context of the present-day settings, when communication with strangers is reduced to a minimum due to the threat of the COVID-19, the introduction of digital tools needs to be tested as the method […]
• Culturally Sensitive Nurses Teaching Health Literacy When patients from different cultures have a problem understanding healthcare practices, nurses have a role in explaining to them the diagnosis and treatment in a way that acknowledges their cultural needs.
• Technological Literacy and Technical Fluency Tyler argues that technological literacy is the ability to use technology, while fluency in technology is a deep understanding of it and the future it brings to society.
• Media Literacy Research: Analysis of the Issue In the process of research, I have significantly expanded my ability to access and analyze media messages as well as to use the power of information to communicate and make a difference in the world.
• Implementation of the Health Literacy Programs Health Literacy Online Resource is especially vital because it offers detailed instructions on how to perform the client-oriented digital design of health-related websites. Some of the health literacy terms seem to be obvious, and because […]
• Low Health Literacy in Edison Township The prevalence of these outcomes is based on the level of health literacy within a community attributed to the existing social interventions.
• Project Proposal on Budgeting: An Individual’s Economic Literacy Purchasing this device is a long-time dream of mine, as it will allow me to pursue creativity, view media content, and feel more confident in my daily life; in addition, I expect that the iPad […]
• Aspects of Literacy Establishment Alphabet awareness is the ability to identify letters from the alphabet, which is related to writing and understanding letter sounds. Lack of alphabet awareness may prevent the development of writing skills and interfere with understanding […]
• Corporate Media Consolidation: Everyday Media Literacy The third significant issue that arises with media consolidation is the intensification of censorship and the threat to broad media choice.
• “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy” by Clive Thompson Reasoning in the framework of the text, the readers notice a subsequent transition of the argument from “kids today cannot write” and “age of illiteracy” to “literacy revolution” and “write for an audience”.
• Clinical Field Experience: Integrating Creative Arts and Literacy Formative assessment is critical for the identification of the gaps students may have and the material they may have failed to cover properly.
• Health Literacy and Patient Education The Internet’s accessibility made various types of health information available for any person, and many consumers developed a habit to check the online sources for symptoms or primarily help before reaching out to a healthcare […]
• The NP Core Competency of Technology and Information Literacy I advised him to consult a physician, and my use of EHRs appeared to be helpful because it allowed the physician to access patient data easily and confirm the diagnosis of hypertension.
• Literacy Bags as a Useful Pedagogical Tool The use of literacy bags addresses family involvement, instilling a love of learning, and controlling homeschooling. The contents of the bag depending on the topic being taught and the teacher’s intentions.
• Family Literacy Night Parents ensure that children develop positive, nurturing relationships with adults and have better opportunities to initiate and engage in conversations.
• Health Literacy: Strategies to Minimize Barriers In the training of a medical worker, the role of studying natural science and clinical disciplines is undeniable, but the ability of employees to master their speech well, their ability to listen and hear, and […]
• Media Violence and Importance of Media Literacy Media literacy is the public’s ability to access, decode, evaluate and transmit a message from media. Improved media literacy and education will enable the responsible consumption of information.
• Strategies for Teaching Literacy in a Secondary Classroom: Annotated Bibliography Beforehand, the authors discuss potential obstacles, including disabilities, a cycle of failure, and the absence of motivation, and provide a socio-linguistic background to the literacy acquisition process.
• Meeting Small Group’s Literacy Needs One peculiarity of this approach to lesson organization is that it offers minimal opportunities for the differentiation of instruction, and it is reasonable to give preference to this approach when introducing concepts that are totally […]
• Emergent Literacy: How to Make Your Child’s Life Easier? While in the womb, the fetus remembers the rhythm of language, hears the first sounds, and tries to interpret them. The key to this approach is the recognition that the language is not discrete, which […]
• Phonological and Phonemic Awareness and Literacy Development Simultaneously, phonemic awareness is a more advanced understanding of language, the next level of phonological awareness, when a person can identify and manage the smallest units of speech, the phoneme.
• Information Literacy and Power in Business The information is complete when all the data and associated context relevant for the problem is available. Information is crucial in determining business/organization success, success factors are determined from the data and context.
• Models of Information Literacy for Business Report Finally by the end of the lesson the learner should be able to obtain new knowledge in the use of literacy information.
• Literacy and Numeracy in the Geography Subject Area In the given sample, the student, Pat, demonstrates the basic understanding of the topic, and her skills seem to be poor. The presented sequence of lessons is designed to improve students’ numeracy and literacy skills […]
• Enhancing Health Literacy for People With Type 2 Diabetes Two professionals, Andrew Long, a professor in the school of heath care in the University of Leeds, and Tina Gambling, senior lecturer in the school of health care studies from the University of Cardiff, conducted […]
• The Importance of Health Literacy In essence, health literacy is very important to all stakeholders in health care settings. Health literacy is one of the most common issues in healthcare settings.
• Assessing Health Literacy in Patients Health literacy is critical since, at any time in the patient’s life, they must discover, comprehend, and use health services and information.
• Health Literacy: Does It Make a Difference? The article investigates how health literacy contributes to the general development of the nursing practice. The article continues by outlining how health literacy is of benefit to healthcare.
• Literacy Demands in the Australian English Syllabus The curriculum also requires learners to “explore the difference in the use of English both at home and school, depending on the relationship between the speakers”.
• Story of Media Literacy Overview Consequently, it is imperative for students and people, in general, to consume media content objectively and to analyze the message portrayed in the news.
• Thinking, Learning, and Literacy in the Internet Age However, one can present a counterargument to the given statement by claiming that it is not reading that is negatively affected by the web, but rather the style or format of the activity.
• Health Literacy and Access to Healthcare Services: Problems, Interventions, and Suggestions for Improvements Unfortunately, due to the emergence of new health threats and the lack of accessibility to healthcare, as well as the absence of basic health literacy in an upsettingly large number of the U.S.population, changes have […]
• Effects of Information Literacy on Scholarship, Practice and Leadership in Teaching Profession The first and the most obvious negative aspect of the introduction of information literacy into the field of SPL in the sphere of teaching profession is the abundance of sources and the search for the […]
• Emergent Literacy Skills in Children With Hearing Loss The research is stated to “learn more about the early development of literacy skills by examining changes over a typical school year for small children with hearing losses” specifically within the group of young children, […]
• Beginning Literacy Learner Study It does not amount to too much trouble for now, as he is able to perform the majority of the tasks and pass the majority of the tests with relative success.
• Philosophy of Literacy Instruction And, of course, the literacy educator needs to be critical of his work and seek opportunities for personal improvement Literacy educator needs to understand that reading and writing are social activities and that students should […]
• Literacy Studies: Teaching Writing In the context of second language writing several theories have been established; which are commonly the process theories and the genre theories.
• “Visual Literacy Theory” by Paul Messaris In its turn, this points out at the fallacious essence of Messaris’ idea that spatial intelligence is an objective category: “One of the clearest examples of spatial intelligence is the ability of movies to conjure […]
• Information Literacy in Public Safety Sector Professionals are supposed to be prepared by providing theories inform of public safety scholars and research did to understand them before availing the information to the public.
• Developing Children’s Language and Literacy Skills The culture of the society his family belongs to greatly influences how he imbibes the culture and how he expresses his developing personality.
• American Education System and Cultural Literacy In the recant past, he has become critical of the cognitive revolution and has explored for the construction of cultural psychology that weighs very much the factors like historical and social settings of the contributors.
• Literacy Theories in Action Emergent literacy is the term used to refer to the earliest period of a child’s literacy development, specifically the time between birth and when the child can read and write.
• “Literacy in Three Metaphors” by Sylvia Scribner The fundamental proposal presented by the author revolves around the thought that the main problem of literacy is the conceptualization and formulation of a proper education plan.
• Early Years Literacy: Analysis and Development The paper consists of three major parts: a description of a literacy event in which I participated, a detailed analysis of all the aspects of the event, implications for teaching, and a conclusion.
• Literacy Learning Across Diverse Contexts: Digestive System All of the four activities described in curriculum planning can be justified on the basis of their connection to the children’s age and experience.
• Literacy and Numeracy Demands Genre is used to describe the elemnts of communication channels or types, usually the types of texts and specific language, which emerged within a specific community.
• Disciplinary Literacy in a Content-Area Classroom The purpose of this paper is to give a detailed overview of the concept of disciplinary literacy and the most appropriate approaches for a content-area classroom.
• “What Is Literacy? The Power of a Definition” by Keefe & Copeland In the first section of the article, the researchers describe some of the conflicting beliefs about the definition of literacy. The article is significant to education and literacy instruction as it shows the need for […]
• Pandemic Flu: Health Literacy The higher the readability score, the easier it is to percept the ideas reflected in the text. The higher this score, the better the understanding of a document by the reader is.
• Literacy Development in Five Stages The question that children tend to ask during the stage of awareness and exploration are the main signifiers of the literacy development process being launched.
• Emerging Literacy and Assessment in Education Finally, the application of assessments in early education will inform a teacher about the gaps in a student’s knowledge system and the strategies that can be used to fill these gaps.
• Emerging Literacy Class: Expectations and Objectives Therefore, learning how to locate emerging literacy and use it to prompt the evolution of one’s language skills is central to the successful development of an individual.
• Digital Literacy: Gender and Socio-Economic Aspects Thereby, digital literacy is defined by the opportunity to access information technology and Internet resources, based on the culture, economic, and social development of a country.
• Political Media Literacy Program The focus on social media is especially crucial as these platforms do not have many rules and tools to check the authenticity of the posted information.
• Reading Literacy Development and Instruction In the overviewed classroom, the evaluation of the literacy skills of the students was sustained by offering the learners to complete a multi-discipline test, which matches the Common Core State Literacy Standard. The outcomes of […]
• The Literacy Principal: Leading, Supporting and Assessing One of the ways is to pay attention to the rhyming, as the students will be able to find similarities in words and sounds.
• Literacy Environment for Young Learners This paper examines the arrangement of objects in the classroom and the required teaching skills that enhance literacy in young learners.
• Emergent Literacy and Reading Lesson Plans Topic or Unit of Study: Derivations Subject: Word recognition Grade/Level: 3 Grade: 3rd Subject: Language Arts Time: 30 minutes Amount: 10 students C1.
• Digital Literacy Promotion at a Community Event In the course of the event, the attendees will be explained the basics of how the new technology will help learners from Pre-Kindergarten through 12th-grade students in school districts and adult learners at the community […]
• Rebecca’s Literacy Development: Non-Cognitive Aspects As to the non-cognitive aspects of the student’s literacy, the girl loves to read and uses every opportunity for it though is embarrassed to read aloud to the others.
• Digital Literacy and Higher Education in Knowledge Economy Altbach, Reisberg, and Rumbley argue that the “phenomenon of massification ” is what has led to a major revolution in university education.
• Literacy Theory and Practice in Teaching Reading Due to the fact that the English language prevails in the sphere of international business and technology, it is important for students to have a sufficient command of language.
• Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach The authors describe the lesson developed by Mrs Firpo, who illustrates a set of techniques that can help children see the connection between graphemes and sounds. I think that the methods and ideas of Mrs […]
• Home-Based Literacy Program and Educators The selection and training of home visitors should be based on the ability of these teachers to handle children and their families.
• Literacy Challenges at the Postsecondary Level In this view, the article asserts that student learning is less effective when classes are large and the material taught is new to the learners. The feelings of anonymity and lack of self-directed learning on […]
• Literacy Standards and Reading Instruction Theory Besides the development of efficient teaching strategies, the recent programs are also oriented on the supporting students and ensuring them with effective reading activities.
• Active Literacy Across the Curriculum In addition, the author also expressed the idea about the importance of the literacy mapping a process that would help educational authorities to keep track of the consistency with which literacy is taught in schools, […]
• Individual Literacy Narrative The purpose of this narrative is to describe how I have managed to develop this kind of literacy. The most outstanding observation is that various events and experiences have made it easier for me to […]
• Records of Literacy in Qin and Early Han Dynasties The main aim of the text is, according to the author, to review the records of literacy among the lower orders during the Qin and early Han dynasties.
• Computer Literacy: Parents and Guardians Role Filtering and monitoring content on the internet is one of the most important roles that parents in the contemporary world should play, and it reveals that parents care about their children.
• Instructional Practices for Emergent Literacy Learners On the level of listening and speaking, the emergent literacy learner should be able to use language to express opinions related to the discussed topic, follow the directions given by the teacher when it comes […]
• School Literacy Environment for Younger Students For Birth to Pre-K group, the classroom environment will be organized to engage students in physical, emotional, and cognitive activities. In K to Grade 3, the students will be driven towards reading fluency and reading […]
• “Charlotte’s Web” by White for Literacy Development The task of a teacher is to keep the learners interested and motivated. On the whole, literacy and language development is a complicated process.
• Literacy Strategies in a Social Studies Classroom It may help to put the text in a broader context and help relate the students’ knowledge about the author to the ideas given in the text.
• Effective Literacy Teaching in Multicultural Class The purpose of the proposed research is to explore, examine and analyze the issues and challenges that embed teacher education in the US, paying attention to the obstacles that limit the implementation of effective literacy […]
• “See World” Thematic Unit: Literacy, Math, Science The thematic unit, which targets the development of reading literacy, focuses on repetition as the prerequisite for the development of correct pronunciation.
• Literacy and Numeracy Across the Curriculum Overall, it is clear that both literacy and numeracy can help societies all over the world to achieve a better future in the 21st century.
• Critical Literacy in Lambert’s Bellies Bear a Burden The text is accompanied by several images, most of which are included to illustrate the dynamics of change in women’s body measurements over the years, as well as a photograph of an obese woman to […]
• Literacy Education and the Workforce This has made organizations set aside a good fraction of their revenue to improve the literacy level of their employees to make them more productive.
• Literacy Coaching Cycle in Learning In an effective literacy coaching, literacy coach should make strategic class visits to access the level of delivery that teachers are attaining.
• Multicultural Literacy: Patricia Polacco and Roald Dahl As the authors explain, it was during her life in this farm that she heard amazing stories about her roots and the time line of her peoples.
• Reading and Literacy: Teacher Education Program It is vital to understand that a teacher’s role is not only sharing knowledge with his or her students but also shaping their worldview and making them ready for life in an economically, culturally, and […]
• Population Literacy Skills in Arab Countries For the tables and the analysis, I chose the two years that were closer together, 2005 and 2009. First of all, after 2005 the internet actively started to win its popularity all around the world […]
• Literacy of Population in Arab Countries That is why this phenomenon can be taken as the main evidence of the problem of poverty peculiar for the majority of these states.
• Early Cochlear Implantation’s Impact on Literacy That way, the design suitable for this research is qualitative and narrative since the focus is the impressions of the quality of life and learning after the implantation.
• IT and Its Effect on Workplace Literacy In the last three decades, information technology in the form of information systems has revolutionized the business approach across the globe.
• Environmental Education and Literacy Program Although scholars and environmental experts are in agreement that environmental education plays a key role in assisting young people in comprehending the nature and complexity of environmental challenges and in developing their capacity to take […]
• Young Child’s Language and Literacy Development In addition, a work of literature on any social issue may influence how children respond to the demands of their learning environments. Taken together, the growing importance of literature in learning and children’s linguistic development […]
• Classroom Literacy: Interactions and Learning Approaches Vocabulary skills are important for improving literacy as well as the overall growth of the student in the classroom and outside classroom environment.
• Visual Literacy and Its Significance The definition of visual literacy provided in the book, in its turn, can be viewed as less restricting in terms of the perception of images by the representatives of different cultures. The use of visual […]
• Instruction and Literacy Development Methods To enhance the students’ learning activities and development of their literacy skills, it is possible to use such computer technologies as the computer software and electronic books at all the stages of learning because different […]
• Ocean Literacy and Exploration From the onset of “human-ocean interaction and exploration in the fifteenth century” and despite ocean being the largest feature of the earth, only 5% of the ocean is known.
• Balanced Literacy Institute and Teacher Cadre Another important and beneficial point of the training is that the material is selected with a unique understanding of the needs of students and teachers.
• Diverse Classrooms and Literacy The recruitment of a significant proportion of literacy teachers from various ethnic backgrounds is necessary to effectively address issues on language understanding and fluency in reading.
• Education Theories: Why Literacy Matters? By definition, literacy is “the ability and the willingness to use reading and writing to construct meaning from the printed text”. Literacy makes a positive contribution to the economic prosperity of an individual and promotes […]
• Technological Literacy Unit Plan Housing is a social issue that is always contained in the economic blueprints of different countries, however, the cost of buying a house is high and people who get locked out of the financing avenues […]
• English Literacy Lessons for Australian Students. When Theory Meets Practice Once a teacher introduces the concept of metacognition to the students, it will be easier to help the students link reading and writing: “Adding components of metacognition supports students in learning how to summarize and […]
• How Effective Teachers Support the Youngest Children’s Literacy Development? The effective teachers should be aware of the most common issues the youngest learners may face and understand the methods to address the issues.
• Balanced Literacy Program Introduction is as important, perhaps, even more to the flow of the class and positive atmosphere between the teacher and students.
• Factors that Influence Literacy Acquisition and Reading Achievement Finally, the paper will highlight some contrary arguments that tend to downplay the role of parents in children’s learning at home and at school.
• Expert Literacy Teachers: What Has Been Learned One of the key insights that I have gained in the process of learning about the role of the RTI in shaping the responsibilities and strategies of an expert literacy teacher concerns the fact that […]
• Conducting an Assessment: Students’ Progress in Mastering Literacy: What Needs to Be Improved Helping students acquire the basic literacy skills is one of the key tasks of a teacher, and the reading skills are at the top of the teacher’s priority list.
• Strategies to Support Balanced Literacy After the learners finish reading the story, the teacher should ask them to narrate their feelings and thoughts about the experience.
• Literacy Instruction for African American Students The research results state that the process of literacy instruction is hindered to an impressive degree by the misunderstandings between teachers and students due to the language issues.
• Problems of Reading and Literacy The article covers the how, what and when of the visual essays, experiences and how to teach them to improve reading and literacy. It is with no doubt that problems of reading and literacy are […]
• Early Literacy Development The literacy development is a concept related to acquisition of reading and writing skills. The problem of literacy development in preschool-aged children requires a specific approach to be taken and applied.
• Literacy Linguistic Usage Finally, it is vital to apply the findings on the relationships between language and identity in the practical sphere of learning and teaching languages.
• Issues of Children Literacy The best way to make parents and guardians aware of the importance of child literacy is to communicate to them the results of researches that have studied the relationship between early childhood literacy levels and […]
• Balanced Literacy Overview The book written by Margaret Haddix and entitled Dexter the Tough is concerned with quite a difficult period in the life of Dexter, the protagonist of the book.
• An Early Literacy Intervention The major implication of the study was that effective intervention programs have the capacity to close the gaps in early educational literacy.
• How Are Literacy, Fluency and Reading Comprehension Affected by Using Oral Reading Methods in the Classroom? Rasinski states that one of the most effective ways to assess a learner’s reading ability is for the instructor to listen to the learner reading.
• NELP Report: Impact of Shared-Reading Interventions on Young Children’s Literacy Skills In particular, the authors focus on the analysis of randomized control trial and quasiexperimental design with reference to the evaluation of the efficiency of the interventions with the results.
• Comprehensive Literacy Model The attention of students should be focused on the common roots of the vocabulary in use such as the suffixes and the prefixes.
• Literacy of women in Europe and Middle East Women’s leadership and women in the telecommunication businesses are some of the points that need to be put into consideration and women’s contribution to the economic opportunities that may affect each and every one of […]
• Financial Literacy: How Do Ordinary People Cope with Their Financial Tasks? The goal of the project was to examine the levels of financial literacy in ordinary citizens and their implications for financial literacy education.
• Literacy Development in Adults Barton and Hamilton and Purcell-Gates et al judge literacy, based on the ways in which literacy is used in real-life situations; the role of education in the development of literacy; and the importance of real-life […]
• Perspectives of Adult Literacy They argue that literacy is not an outcome of local practices since there are social structures and technology in the global society that affect the acquisition of literacy skills.
• Internet Effect on Education and Students’ Literacy Lots of people prefer real life communication in order to observe the emotions, to follow the reactions, to provide with some support, and, finally, to know for sure whom you are talking to.
• From the First Language Literacy to the Second Language Proficiency The above observation was also apparent in the study by Benseman, Sutton and Lander who explained that, the involvement of the learner in the teaching allows students to increase their use of first language literacy […]
• Literacy: Diagnosing Reading Skills, Reporting Progress & Outcome Data Assessment Tools Progress Diagnostic Outcome Individual or Group Assessment Additional Explanation of Use IRI X X I IRI are used with individual students to assess the progress and diagnose the development of definite reading […]
• New Service to Be Offered: Information Literacy Seminars for New Students In this view, the information literacy targets both librarians and students, as their relationships have a significant impact on the development of information literacy in a learning institution.
• SMS Technology and Its Effect on Literacy The use of SMS behind the screens of the cell phones and computers become a shield against engaging in conversations and this affects one’s ability to verbally communicate with others.
• Technological Access, Literacy and Fluency However, not all members of the community surrounding the University are technologically literate. To improve access to digital technology in Michigan Technological University and the surrounding areas, various measures should be put in place.
• Article Reflection about Literacy Reflecting on these four articles; ‘There is reading…and then there’s reading,’ ‘Taking literacy skills home,’ ‘The importance of the act of reading,’ and ‘the new literacy studies’ I cannot help but appreciate and celebrate the […]
• Violence and Adult Literacy Opportunities Literacy has significant implications for reducing violence against women, and this paper explores the reasons behind and solutions to continued illiteracy in adult women. The reasons behind the failure of literacy to reduce violence and […]
• Literacy Poses in Paulo Freire’s Philosophy The golden middle in adult literacy education is in being able to transform the theories and rules of language into the forms and meanings that are understandable to learners.
• Reading Commentary About Literacy Articles: What Does Literacy Mean? This paper tries to explain the reasons of low literacy in Canada and offers recommendations to improve the quality of workplace performance in the country.
• Children’s Literature for Literacy Children literature deserves lots of attention; it provides the reader with an opportunity to investigate the worlds of different people, analyze oneself, and comprehend each piece of information because of such features as a friendly […]
• Literacy Coaching in Modern Education The standard is also utilized by these individuals in assessment of the candidates and effectiveness’s of the program. The NCATE utilizes a criterion which is based on this standard in making decisions related to accreditation […]
• Modern theories about literacy The articles of Darville, Atwood and Hamilton provide the practical and theoretical evidence to support the efficiency of these new approaches to literacy; due to the accounts given by authors, one can estimate the true […]
• My Struggle for Literacy in America The main purpose of this presentation is to convince the audience that literacy is one of the skills that a person can and should develop.
• The Cornerstones to Early Literacy Displacement is the idea that language can be used to communicate on things not in the immediate environment. One unique feature of language is that children, growing up, can easily learn how to communicate in […]
• Marketing of New Services – Set up Information Literacy Talks for Mature An effort is made to discuss the potential customer base for these services and to evaluate strategies to create and manage relationships with all potential customers for the proposed services and communicating the service to […]
• Literacy Practices Inventory and With the advent of technology and the Internet, the concept of a community becomes effective irrespective of the members’ physical locations because they are not limited by the mode of communication or transportation.
• Culture, Literacy, and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind by Carol D. Lee She describes the way students respond to improved scheme and the way teachers modify the cultural background of the language or English arts program.
• Creating a Theory of Cultural Literacy It is uniformly, if not more, essential to be capable of communicating using the general idioms and references of the culture which people of that culture practice. It is thus essential that culture literacy is […]
• Literacy in Young Children In this context, literacy is considered the possession of the ability to read and write. Lastly, the social angle shows that in most societies where there’s a modicum of literacy, young children embrace the education […]
• “Perspectives on Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities” by Ana Celia Zentella The review focuses on the socialization involved in the acquisition of the two languages. Parents are actively involved in the development of language and education.
• Reading and Literacy Statistics In order to examine the historical development of reading, it is necessary to refer to the analysis and definition of spoken language and human communication and consider reading a necessity to sharing and retaining information.
• Why Can Financial Advice Not Substitute for Financial Literacy?
• Does Financial Literacy Improve Financial Inclusion?
• How Does Economic Education Impact Economic Literacy?
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The Power of Literacy Narratives

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I first learned to read at the age of three while sitting on my grandmother’s lap in her high-rise apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, IL. While flipping casually through Time magazine, she noticed how I took a keen interest in the blur of black and white shapes on the page. Soon, I was following her wrinkled finger from one word to the next, sounding them out, until those words came into focus, and I could read. It felt as though I had unlocked time itself.

What Is a “Literacy Narrative?”

What are your strongest memories of reading and writing? These stories, otherwise known as “literacy narratives,” allow writers to talk through and discover their relationships with reading, writing, and speaking in all its forms. Narrowing in on specific moments reveals the significance of literacy’s impact on our lives, conjuring up buried emotions tied to the power of language, communication, and expression.

To be “ literate ” implies the ability to decode language on its most basic terms, but literacy also expands to one’s ability to "read and write" the world — to find and make meaning out of our relationships with texts, ourselves, and the world around us. At any given moment, we orbit language worlds. Soccer players, for example, learn the language of the game. Doctors talk in technical medical terms. Fishermen speak the sounds of the sea. And in each of these worlds, our literacy in these specific languages allows us to navigate, participate and contribute to the depth of knowledge generated within them.

Famous writers like Annie Dillard, author of "The Writing Life," and Anne Lammot, "Bird by Bird," have penned literacy narratives to reveal the highs and lows of language learning, literacies, and the written word. But you don’t have to be famous to tell your own literacy narrative — everyone has their own story to tell about their relationships with reading and writing. In fact, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a publicly accessible archive of personal literacy narratives in multiple formats featuring over 6,000 entries. Each shows the range of subjects, themes, and ways into the literacy narrative process as well as variations in terms of voice, tone, and style.

How to Write Your Own Literacy Narrative

Ready to write your own literacy narrative but don’t know where to begin?

• Think of a story linked to your personal history of reading and writing. Perhaps you want to write about your favorite author or book and its impact on your life. Maybe you remember your first brush with the sublime power of poetry. Do you remember the time you first learned to read, write or speak in another language? Or maybe the story of your first big writing project comes to mind. Make sure to consider why this particular story is the most important one to tell. Usually, there are powerful lessons and revelations uncovered in the telling of a literacy narrative.
• Wherever you begin, picture the first scene that comes to mind in relation to this story, using descriptive details. Tell us where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing in this specific moment when your literacy narrative begins. For example, a story about your favorite book may begin with a description of where you were when the book first landed in your hands. If you’re writing about your discovery of poetry, tell us exactly where you were when you first felt that spark. Do you remember where you were when you first learned a new word in a second language?
• Continue from there to explore the ways in which this experience had meaning for you. What other memories are triggered in the telling of this first scene? Where did this experience lead you in your writing and reading journey? To what extent did it transform you or your ideas about the world? What challenges did you face in the process? How did this particular literacy narrative shape your life story? How do questions of power or knowledge come into play in your literacy narrative?

Writing Toward a Shared Humanity

Writing literacy narratives can be a joyful process, but it can also trigger untapped feelings about the complexities of literacy. Many of us carry scars and wounds from early literacy experiences. Writing it down can help us explore and reconcile these feelings in order to strengthen our relationship with reading and writing. Writing literacy narratives can also help us learn about ourselves as consumers and producers of words, revealing the intricacies of knowledge, culture, and power bound up in language and literacies. Ultimately, telling our literacy stories brings us closer to ourselves and each other in our collective desire to express and communicate a shared humanity.​

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein is a poet, writer, and educator from Chicago, IL (USA) who currently splits her time in East Africa. Her essays on arts, culture, and education appear in Teaching Artist Journal, Art in the Public Interest, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Teaching Tolerance, The Equity Collective, AramcoWorld, Selamta, The Forward, among others.

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How to Write a Literacy Narrative Essay | Guide & Examples

• Icon Calendar 15 May 2024
• Icon Page 5213 words
• Icon Clock 24 min read

Mastering an art of writing requires students to have a guideline of how to write a good literacy narrative essay, emphasizing the details they should consider. This article begins by defining this type of academic document, its distinctive features, and its unique structure. Moreover, the guideline teaches students how to choose some topics and provides a sample outline and an example of a literacy narrative essay. Other crucial information is the technical details writers should focus on when writing a document, 10 things to do and not to do, and essential tips for producing a high-standard text. Therefore, reading this guideline benefits students and others because one gains critical insights that help to start writing a literacy narrative essay and want to meet a scholarly standard.

General Aspects of How to Write an Outstanding Literacy Narrative Essay

Learning how to write many types of essays should be a priority for any student hoping to be intellectually sharp. Besides being an exercise for academic assessment, writing is a platform for developing mental faculties, including intellect, memory, imagination, reason, and intuition. This guideline of how to write a literacy narrative, and this type of essay requires students to tell their story through the text. It defines a literacy narrative, distinctive text features, unique structure, possible topics students can choose from, and the technicality of writing this kind of text. There is also a sample outline and an example of a good literacy narrative essay. Hence, this guideline gives students critical insights for writing a high-standard literacy narrative essay.

Definition of What Is a Literacy Narrative Essay and Its Meaning

A literacy narrative is an essay that tells the writer’s personal story. It differs from other types of papers, including an argumentative essay, an analytical essay, a cause and effect essay, a report, or a research paper. While these other texts require students to borrow information from different sources to strengthen a thesis statement and back up claims, a literacy narrative means that students narrate an experience or event that has impacted them significantly. In other words, writers focus on one or several aspects of their lives and construct a story through the text. Therefore, when writing a literacy narrative essay, students should examine and reexamine their life course to identify experiences, events, or issues that stand out because they were pleasant or unpleasant. After identifying a memorable aspect of their life, students should use their accumulated knowledge to construct a narrative through speaking, reading, or writing.

Distinctive Features of a Literacy Narrative Essay

Every type of scholarly text has distinctive features that differentiate it from others. While some features may be standard among academic papers, most are not. Therefore, when writing a literacy narrative essay, students must first familiarize themselves with the features that make this kind of document distinct from others, like reports and research papers. With such knowledge, writers can know when to use an element when telling their personal stories through writing. Some distinctive features of a literacy narrative essay include a personal tone, a private tale, descriptive language, show-not-tell, active voice, similes and metaphors, and dialogue.

💠 Personal Tone

A personal tone is a quality that makes a narrative personal, meaning it is the writer telling the story. In this respect, students should use the first-person language, such as ‘I’ and ‘we,’ throughout the story. Using these terms makes the audience realize that the story is about the writer and those close to them, such as family, peers, and colleagues. The value of using a personal tone in writing a literacy narrative essay is that it reinforces the story’s theme, such as celebration or tragedy. In essence, people hearing, listening, or reading the story can appreciate its direct effect on the reader, speaker, or writer.

💠 Private Story

The essence of a literacy narrative essay is to tell a personal story. In this respect, telling people about a private experience, event, or issue gives this kind of text a narrative identity. Although the story people tell need not be about them, they must have been witnesses. For example, one can write a literacy narrative essay about their worst experience after joining college. Such a narrative should tell a private story involving the writer directly. Alternatively, people can write a literacy narrative essay about the day they witnessed corruption in public office. Such a narrative should not necessarily focus on the writer but on corrupt individuals in public office. Therefore, a private story should have the writer as the central character or a witness to an event.

💠 Descriptive Language

Since a literacy narrative essay is about a personal, private story that tells the writer’s experience, it is critical to provide details that help the audience to identify with the experience. Individuals can only do this activity by using descriptive language in their stories because the audience uses the information to imagine what they hear or read. An example of descriptive language is where, instead of writing, “I passed my aunt by the roadside as I headed home to inform others about the event,” one should write, “As I headed home to inform others about the happening, I came across my aunt standing on the roadside with a village elder in what seemed like a deep conversation about the event that had just transpired.” This latter statement is rich with information the audience can use to imagine the situation.

💠 Show-Not-Tell

A literacy narrative essay aims to help the audience to recreate the writer’s experience in their minds. As such, they focus less on telling the audience what happened and more on ‘showing’ them how events unfolded. A practical method for doing this activity is comprehensively narrating experiences and events. For example, authors should not just write about how an experience made them feel, but they should be thorough in their narration by telling how the feeling affected them, such as influencing them to do something. As a result, a literacy narrative essay allows writers to show the audience how past experiences, events, or situations affected them or influenced their worldviews.

💠 Active Voice

Academic writing conventions demand that students write non-scientific scholarly documents, including literacy narrative essays, in the active voice, meaning writing in a form where the subject of a sentence performs the action. Practically, it should follow the following format: subject + verb + object. For example, this arrangement makes the sentence easy to read but, most importantly, keeps meanings in sentences clear and avoids complicating sentences or making them too wordy. The opposite of the active voice is the passive voice, which is common in scientific papers. The following sentence exemplifies the active voice: “The young men helped the old lady climb the stairs.” A passive voice would read: “The old woman was helped by the young men to climb up the stairs.” As is evidence, the active voice is simple, straightforward, and short as opposed to the passive voice.

💠 Similes and Metaphors

Similes and metaphors are literary devices or figures of speech writers use to compare two things that are not alike in literacy narrative essays. The point of difference between these aspects is that similes compare two things by emphasizing one thing is like something else, while metaphors emphasize one thing is something else. Simply put, similes use the terms ‘is like’ or ‘is as…as’ to emphasize comparison between two things. A metaphor uses the word ‘is’ to highlight the comparison. Therefore, when writing a literary narrative essay, students should incorporate similes by saying, “Friendship is like a flowery garden,” meaning friendship is pleasant. An example of a metaphor one can use is the statement: “My uncle’s watch is a dinosaur,” meaning it is ancient, a relic.

Dialogue is communication between two or more people familiar with plays, films, or novels. The purpose of this kind of communication is to show the importance of an issue to different people. Generally, discussions are the most common platforms for dialogue because individuals can speak their minds and hear what others say about the same problem. Dialogue is a distinctive feature of a literacy narrative essay because it allows writers to show-not-tell. Authors can show readers how their interaction with someone moved from pleasant to unpleasant through dialogue. Consequently, dialogue can help readers to understand the writer’s attitudes, mindset, or state of mind during an event described in the text. As such, incorporating a dialogue in a literacy narrative essay makes the text personal to the writer and descriptive to the reader.

Unique Structure of a Literacy Narrative Essay

Besides the distinctive features above, a literacy narrative is distinct from other types of scholarly documents because it has a unique essay structure. In academic writing, a text’s structure denotes essay outline that writers adopt to produce the work. For example, it is common knowledge that essays should have three sections: introduction, body, and conclusion. In the same way, literacy narratives, which also follow this outline, have a structure, which students should demonstrate in the body. The structure addresses a literacy issue, solution, lesson, and summary. This structure allows writers to produce a coherent paper that readers find to have a logical flow of ideas.

1️⃣ Literacy Issue

A literacy issue signifies a problem or struggles for the writer and is the personal or private issue that the narrative focuses on. Ideally, students use this issue to give the audience a sneak peek into their personalities and private life. Most literacy issues are personal experiences involving a problem or struggle and their effect on the writer and those close to them, like family members or friends. Therefore, when writing a literacy narrative essay, students should identify personal problems or struggles in their past and make them the paper’s focal subject.

2️⃣ Solution

The solution element in a literacy narrative essay describes how writers overcame their problems or managed personal struggles. Simply put, it is where authors tell and show readers how they solved the personal, private issue that is the paper’s subject. Such information is crucial to readers because they need to know what happened to the writer, who they see as the hero or protagonist of the story. For example, literacy narratives are informative because they show the audience how writers dealt with a problem or struggle and how they can use the same strategy to overcome their examples. From this perspective, students should write a literacy narrative essay to inform and empower readers through insights that are relevant and applicable to one’s life.

The lesson element is the message readers get from the writer’s narrative about a literacy issue and its solution. For example, students can talk about how lacking confidence affects their social life by undermining their ability to create and nurture friendships. This problem is personal and becomes a literacy issue. Then, they show readers how they dealt with the situation, such as reading books and articles on building personal confidence. Writers should use practical examples of how they solved their problems or struggles. Overall, including all the information about the unique situation or struggle and the solution helps readers to learn a lesson, what they take away after reading the text. As such, students should know that their literacy narrative essays must have a lesson for their readers.

4️⃣ Summary

The summary element briefly describes a personal experience and its effects. Every literacy narrative essay must summarize the writer’s experience to allow readers to judge, such as learning the value of something. When summarizing their personal story, such as an experience, students should understand that the summary must be brief but detailed enough to allow readers to put themselves in their place. In other words, the summary must be relevant to the reader and the broader society. The most crucial element in the summary is emphasizing the lesson from the personal issue by telling how the writer addressed the personal issue.

Examples of Famous Literacy Narrative Essays

Research is an essential activity that helps writers to find credible sources to support their work. When writing literacy narrative essays, students should adopt this approach to find famous literacy narratives and discover what makes them popular in the literary world. Students should focus on how writers adopt the unique structure described above. The list below highlights five popular literacy narratives because they are high-standard texts.

Learning to Read by Malcolm X

Malcolm X’s Learning to Read is a literacy narrative that describes his journey to enlightenment. The text reflects the unique structure of a literacy narrative because it communicates a personal issue, the solution to the problem, a lesson to the reader, and a summary of the writer’s experience. For example, the literacy issue is the writer’s hardships that inspired his journey to becoming a literate activist. After dropping from school at a young age, Malcolm X committed a crime that led to his imprisonment. The solution to his hardships was knowledge, and he immersed himself in education by reading in the prison library, gaining essential knowledge that helped him to confront his reality. The lesson is that education is transformative, and people can educate themselves from ignorance to enlightenment. The summary is that personal struggles are a ladder to more extraordinary life achievements.

Scars: A Life in Injuries by David Owen

David Owen’s Scars: A Life in Injuries is a literacy narrative that adopts the unique structure above. The literacy issue in the story is Owen’s scars, including over ten injuries and witnessing Duncan’s traumas. For example, the solution that the article proposes for dealing with personal scars is finding a purpose in each. The text describes how Owen saw each scar not as bad but as something that gave him a reason to live. The lesson is that scars are not just injuries but stories people can tell others to give hope and a reason for living. The summary is that life’s misfortunes should not be a reason to give up but a motivation to press on. It clarifies that, while misfortunes can lead to despair, one must be bold enough to see them as scars, not disabilities.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son reflects the writer’s tense relationship with his father in the context of racial tension that gripped New York City in the mid-20th century. The story fits the unique structure of a literacy narrative. The personal issue in the text is the writer’s tense relationship with his father. The solution to this struggle is accepting life as it is and humans as they are, not struggling to change anyone or anything. For example, the lesson in the text is that the family can cause pain and anguish, and the best people can do is not to let others influence their feelings, attitude, behaviors, or motivations in life. The summary is that people’s struggles are a fire that sparks a revolution of ideas that uplift them and others in the broader society.

Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father is the story of the writer’s search for his biracial identity that satisfies the unique structure of a literacy narrative. For example, the personal issue in the text is Obama’s desire to understand the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, which propelled him to travel to Kenya. The journey exposed him to brutal poverty and tribal conflict and a community with an enduring spirit. The solution to this personal struggle is becoming a community organizer in the tumultuous political and racial strife that birthed despair in the inner cities. The reader learns that community is valuable in healing wounds that can lead to distress. The summary is that family is crucial to one’s identity, and spending time to know one’s background is helpful for a purposeful and meaningful life.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast recalls the writer’s time in Paris during the 1920s. The personal issue in the text is dealing with a changing Paris. The solution to the writer’s struggle was to build a network of friends and use them as a study. For example, the text summarizes the writer’s story by discussing his relationships, including befriending Paul Cézanne, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott  Fitzgerald. He found some unpleasant and others very hedonistic. The reader learns from the text that friendships are vital in one’s professional journey because they provide insights into the attitudes that make up the human community. The summary is that one’s friendships are crucial in social and intellectual development, despite the weaknesses of some friends.

Topic Examples for Writing a Good Literacy Narrative Essay

Since students may get a chance to write a literacy narrative essay, they should learn how to choose good essay topics. Typically, students receive instructions specifying the topic, but, sometimes, such specifications may be lacking. In such an instance, one must know how to choose a good theme from lists of popular narrative essay topics or personal essay topics. For example, the best approach in selecting a subject is to read widely while noting valuable ideas. These aspects are a good starting point when deciding the subject of a literacy narrative essay. The following list provides easy topics for this kind of scholarly paper because they require students to tell a personal story, addressing the elements of the unique structure.

• Overcoming a Fear That Changed My Life
• A Memorable Day in Winter
• My Experience in an Adventure in Africa
• The Greatest Lessons in Friendship
• My Family Is My Anchor
• The Day I Will Never Forget
• My Life as a Community Advocate
• Delving Into the Enigma of Alternate Universes: A Hypothetical Journey

Sample Outline Template for Writing a Literacy Narrative Essay

I. Essay Introduction

• A hook: An exciting statement to grab the reader’s attention.
• Background of the topic.
• A thesis that states the topic’s significance to the writer and reader.

A. Literacy Issue:

• State the literacy issue that signifies a personal problem, struggle, or issue.

B. Solution

• Give some background information about the literacy issue.
• Describe the setting of the literacy issue.
• Mention some characters involved in solving the literacy issue.
• Give a short story about the literacy issue and its significance.

D. Summary:

• State the outcomes of the literacy issue through detailed language.

III. Conclusion

• Restate the thesis.
• State the outcome and the lesson.

Example of a Literacy Narrative Essay

Topic: My Life as a Community Advocate

I. Example of an Introduction of a Literacy Narrative Essay

Community service is a noble idea that should form part of every person’s life mantra. The context of community is the myriad social issues that may undermine people’s quality of life without adequate interventions. My life as a community advocate is about how I have helped to address social issues without holding any public office, evidence that all one needs is love, concern, focus, and commitment.

II. Examples of Body Paragraphs of a Literacy Narrative Essay

A. literacy issue sample paragraph.

Community service is a noble duty every person should view as an intervention against social problems that potentially undermine the quality of life of vulnerable groups in society, such as children, persons living with disabilities, and senior citizens. Community advocacy is standing up for the community in critical forums where decision-makers gather. As such, my life as a community advocate involves attending community meetings, political gatherings, seminars, and any association that consists of an interaction between ordinary people and those in leadership. My goal in such meetings is to raise issues affecting vulnerable groups in my community, which need more attention from local, state, or national leadership.

B. Solution Sample Paragraph

My life as a community advocate happens in the community where I live and any place where leaders with the power to change the community’s political, economic, and social architecture gather. In this respect, people involved in my role as a community advocate include elected leaders at the local, state, and national levels and leaders of various groups, including senior citizens and persons with disabilities. I also interact with school administrators, social workers, and health professionals like psychologists. These people are valuable in providing insights into different groups’ challenges and what is missing to make their lives satisfactory, if not better. It is common knowledge that vulnerable groups are significantly disadvantaged across dimensions of life, including employment, healthcare, and leadership. Therefore, my life as a community advocate focuses on being a voice for these groups in forums where those with the potential to improve their experiences and outcomes are present.

C. Lesson Sample Paragraph

An event that makes me proud of being a community advocate is when I helped to create a school-based program for children from low-income households below the age of five in my county. The program’s objective was to feed children and provide essential amenities they lacked due to their parent’s or guardians’ economic circumstances. Over time, I have learned that several counties across the state have adopted the program and made the lives of vulnerable children promising.

D. Summary Sample Paragraph

I took part in activities and improved the quality of health support for children. I have learned from several clinicians and social workers that children in the program have shown improved scores in body immunity because of good nutrition. Such news makes me proud to be a community advocate and continue being a voice for the voiceless in a society where politicians have prioritized self-interests in local, state, and national leadership.

III. Example of a Conclusion of a Literacy Narrative Essay

My life as a community advocate has shown me that people can solve social problems without minding their position in the community. The only tools I have used are love, concern, focus, and commitment to make the lives of vulnerable groups satisfactory, if not better. Looking back, I feel proud knowing I have helped vulnerable children to experience a life they may have missed if no one showed love and care. My community advocacy is evidence that people can solve social problems by caring.

4 Easy Steps for Writing a Great Literacy Narrative Essay

Writing a literacy narrative essay is a technical exercise that involves several steps. Each step requires writers to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of how to write this type of scholarly document. In essence, the technical details of writing a good literacy narrative essay are the issues one must address in each step of writing: preparation, stage setup, writing a first draft, and wrap-up. Although not every detail applies in a literacy narrative, most do, and students must grasp all for an improved understanding of what writing a high-standard academic document means.

Step 1: Preparation

Preparation is the first step in starting a literacy narrative essay. One technical detail students should address is defining a specific topic. Typically, instructors choose the topic, but students can select one if such a specification is lacking. For example, the best way to choose a topic is research, where one searches for documents, including famous narratives, on the Internet, using online databases. The second technical detail is to generate ideas, which means reading reliable sources while making notes. In this task, one should consider the audience to determine whether to use simple or technical language.

Step 2: Stage Set Up

Setting the stage is the second step in writing a literacy narrative essay. The first technical detail one needs to address is to create a well-organized outline according to the one above. For example, this task helps writers to assess their ideas to see whether they are sufficient for each paper section. The second technical detail is gathering stories by recalling experiences and events significantly affecting one’s life. The last technical point is constructing a hook, a statement that will help the text to grab readers’ attention from the start.

Step 3: Writing a First Draft

Writing a first draft of a literacy narrative essay is the third step in this activity. The first technical detail students should address is creating a draft. This text is the first product of the writing process and helps writers to judge their work. For example, the main issue is whether they have used all the ideas to construct a compelling narrative. The answer will determine if they will add new ideas or delete some, meaning adding or deleting academic sources. Whatever the outcome, writers may have to alter clear outlines to fit all the ideas necessary to make papers compelling and high-standard.

Writing an Introduction for a Literacy Analysis Essay

Students should focus on three outcomes when writing a good introduction: a hook, context, and thesis. The hook is a statement that captures the reader’s attention. As such, one must use a quote, fact, or question that triggers the reader’s interest to want to read more. Context is telling readers why the topic is vital to write about. A thesis is a statement that summarizes the writer’s purpose for writing a literacy narrative essay.

Writing a Body for a Literacy Analysis Essay

Writing the body part of a literacy narrative essay requires addressing the essential elements of a unique structure. The first element is to state a personal issue and make it the center of the narrative. The best approach is to look into the past and identify an experience or event with a lasting impact. The second element is a solution to the problem or struggle resulting from the personal issue. Therefore, writers should identify personal problems that expose them to conflict with others or social structures and systems. The third element is a lesson, how the personal issue and the solution affect the writer and potentially the reader. The last element is a summary, where authors conclude by giving readers a life perspective relating to the personal story.

Writing a Conclusion for a Literacy Analysis Essay

When writing a conclusion part for a literacy narrative essay, students should summarize the story by reemphasizing the thesis, the personal issue, and the lesson learned. Ideally, the goal of this section is not to introduce new ideas but reinforce what the paper has said and use the main points to conclude the story. As such, writers should not leave readers with questions but give information that allows them to draw a good lesson from the text.

Step 4: Wrap Up

The last step in writing a literacy narrative essay is wrapping up a final draft. The first technical detail students should address is revising the sections without a logical order of ideas. Ideally, one should read and reread their work to ensure the sentences and paragraphs make logical sense. For example, this task should ensure all body paragraphs have a topic sentence, a concluding sentence, and a transition. The next technical detail is editing a final draft by adding or deleting words and fixing grammar and format errors. Lastly, writers should confirm that a literary narrative essay adopts a single formatting style from beginning to end. Content in literacy narratives includes block quotes and dialogue. Students should format them appropriately as follows:

• Block quotes: Select the text to quote, click “Layout” on the ribbon, set the left indent to 0.5cm, click the “Enter” key, then use the arrows in the indent size box to increase or decrease the indentation.
• Dialogue: Use quotation marks to start and end spoken dialogue and create a new paragraph for each speaker.

20 Tips for Writing a Literacy Narrative Essay

Writing a literacy narrative essay requires students to learn several tips. These elements include choosing topics that are meaningful to the writer, generating ideas from the selected themes and putting them in sentence form, creating a clear outline and populating it with the ideas, writing the first draft that reflects the unique structure (literacy issue, solution, lesson, and summary), reading and rereading the draft, revising and editing the draft to produce a high-quality literacy narrative essay, proofreading the document.

10 things to do when writing a literacy narrative essay include:

• developing a hook to grab the readers’ attention,
• writing in paragraphs,
• using the correct grammar,
• incorporating verbs that trigger the reader’s interest,
• showing rather than telling by using descriptive language,
• incorporating a dialogue,
• varying sentence beginnings,
• following figurative speech,
• formatting correctly,
• rereading the text.

10 things not to do include:

• choosing an irrelevant topic that does not stir interest in the reader,
• presenting a long introduction,
• providing a thesis that does not emphasize a personal issue,
• writing paragraphs without topic sentences and transitions,
• ignoring the unique structure of a literacy narrative essay (literacy issue, solution, lesson, and summary),
• focusing on too many personal experiences or events,
• using several formatting styles,
• writing sentences without logical sense,
• finalizing a document with multiple grammatical and formatting mistakes,
• not concluding the narrative by reemphasizing the thesis and lesson learned.

Summing Up on How to Write a Perfect Literacy Narrative Essay

• For writing a good literacy narrative essay, think of a personal experience or an event with a lasting impact.
• Use descriptive language to narrate the experience or event.
• Identify a conflict in the experience or event.
• State how the conflict shaped your perspective.
• Provide a solution to the conflict.
• Mention the setting of the personal experience or event, including people or groups involved.
• State the significance of the experience or event to people and groups involved and the broader society.

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Literacy - List of Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively with others. Essays might discuss the importance of literacy, strategies for improving literacy rates, the relationship between literacy and socioeconomic development, or the digital divide and its impact on literacy. We’ve gathered an extensive assortment of free essay samples on the topic of Literacy you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Early Childhood Language and Literacy Development

Early childhood language and literacy development for the children aged 0-8 years old is strongly influenced by the linguistic environment of the child. ""Many educators and researchers have attempted to address the literacy skills that children will need to succeed in the 21st century and, in doing so, have discovered something of a paradox. Young children these days are so immersed into Ipads and smart phones, (which their little hands can easily hold and navigate by swiping) that they learn […]

The Role of Education and Critical Literacy

The role of education in a democracy is that an education can provide someone with the knowledge of past occurrences of oppression that can be used to fight current social injustices, while the role of critical literacy is that it can help one recognize social issues that continue to affect society. If someone lacks an education or critical literacy skills, than he or she may be unaware that injustices are occurring, or will lack knowledge on how these injustices can […]

Issues in Huxley’s Brave New World

In the novel, “The Brave New World”, Aldous Huxley delineates the petrifying vision of a futuristic world in which high-tech machinery controls the creation and management of everything. In this world, there are no humans but robots with faces of the human. Further, in his novel, he defines happiness as being in a world without moral values, family relationships and personal identity. He tries to depict through his novel the willingness of the people to give up their liberty and […]

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Literacy and Poverty Among African American Children

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Literacy Autobiography: Tracing the Origins and Evolution of my Personal Journey

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The Problems of Child Labour

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Dorian Gray and his Inner Narcissism

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Comparison of Characters between Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451

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Essay Writing: A complete guide for students and teachers

P LANNING, PARAGRAPHING AND POLISHING: FINE-TUNING THE PERFECT ESSAY

Essay writing is an essential skill for every student. Whether writing a particular academic essay (such as persuasive, narrative, descriptive, or expository) or a timed exam essay, the key to getting good at writing is to write. Creating opportunities for our students to engage in extended writing activities will go a long way to helping them improve their skills as scribes.

But, putting the hours in alone will not be enough to attain the highest levels in essay writing. Practice must be meaningful. Once students have a broad overview of how to structure the various types of essays, they are ready to narrow in on the minor details that will enable them to fine-tune their work as a lean vehicle of their thoughts and ideas.

In this article, we will drill down to some aspects that will assist students in taking their essay writing skills up a notch. Many ideas and activities can be integrated into broader lesson plans based on essay writing. Often, though, they will work effectively in isolation – just as athletes isolate physical movements to drill that are relevant to their sport. When these movements become second nature, they can be repeated naturally in the context of the game or in our case, the writing of the essay.

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Planning an essay

The Boys Scouts’ motto is famously ‘Be Prepared’. It’s a solid motto that can be applied to most aspects of life; essay writing is no different. Given the purpose of an essay is generally to present a logical and reasoned argument, investing time in organising arguments, ideas, and structure would seem to be time well spent.

Given that essays can take a wide range of forms and that we all have our own individual approaches to writing, it stands to reason that there will be no single best approach to the planning stage of essay writing. That said, there are several helpful hints and techniques we can share with our students to help them wrestle their ideas into a writable form. Let’s take a look at a few of the best of these:

BREAK THE QUESTION DOWN: UNDERSTAND YOUR ESSAY TOPIC.

Whether students are tackling an assignment that you have set for them in class or responding to an essay prompt in an exam situation, they should get into the habit of analyzing the nature of the task. To do this, they should unravel the question’s meaning or prompt. Students can practice this in class by responding to various essay titles, questions, and prompts, thereby gaining valuable experience breaking these down.

Have students work in groups to underline and dissect the keywords and phrases and discuss what exactly is being asked of them in the task. Are they being asked to discuss, describe, persuade, or explain? Understanding the exact nature of the task is crucial before going any further in the planning process, never mind the writing process .

BRAINSTORM AND MIND MAP WHAT YOU KNOW:

Once students have understood what the essay task asks them, they should consider what they know about the topic and, often, how they feel about it. When teaching essay writing, we so often emphasize that it is about expressing our opinions on things, but for our younger students what they think about something isn’t always obvious, even to themselves.

Brainstorming and mind-mapping what they know about a topic offers them an opportunity to uncover not just what they already know about a topic, but also gives them a chance to reveal to themselves what they think about the topic. This will help guide them in structuring their research and, later, the essay they will write . When writing an essay in an exam context, this may be the only ‘research’ the student can undertake before the writing, so practicing this will be even more important.

RESEARCH YOUR ESSAY

The previous step above should reveal to students the general direction their research will take. With the ubiquitousness of the internet, gone are the days of students relying on a single well-thumbed encyclopaedia from the school library as their sole authoritative source in their essay. If anything, the real problem for our students today is narrowing down their sources to a manageable number. Students should use the information from the previous step to help here. At this stage, it is important that they:

●      Ensure the research material is directly relevant to the essay task

●      Record in detail the sources of the information that they will use in their essay

●      Engage with the material personally by asking questions and challenging their own biases

●      Identify the key points that will be made in their essay

●      Group ideas, counterarguments, and opinions together

●      Identify the overarching argument they will make in their own essay.

Once these stages have been completed the student is ready to organise their points into a logical order.

WRITING YOUR ESSAY

There are a number of ways for students to organize their points in preparation for writing. They can use graphic organizers , post-it notes, or any number of available writing apps. The important thing for them to consider here is that their points should follow a logical progression. This progression of their argument will be expressed in the form of body paragraphs that will inform the structure of their finished essay.

The number of paragraphs contained in an essay will depend on a number of factors such as word limits, time limits, the complexity of the question etc. Regardless of the essay’s length, students should ensure their essay follows the Rule of Three in that every essay they write contains an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Generally speaking, essay paragraphs will focus on one main idea that is usually expressed in a topic sentence that is followed by a series of supporting sentences that bolster that main idea. The first and final sentences are of the most significance here with the first sentence of a paragraph making the point to the reader and the final sentence of the paragraph making the overall relevance to the essay’s argument crystal clear. 

Though students will most likely be familiar with the broad generic structure of essays, it is worth investing time to ensure they have a clear conception of how each part of the essay works, that is, of the exact nature of the task it performs. Let’s review:

Common Essay Structure

Introduction: Provides the reader with context for the essay. It states the broad argument that the essay will make and informs the reader of the writer’s general perspective and approach to the question.

Body Paragraphs: These are the ‘meat’ of the essay and lay out the argument stated in the introduction point by point with supporting evidence.

Conclusion: Usually, the conclusion will restate the central argument while summarising the essay’s main supporting reasons before linking everything back to the original question.

ESSAY WRITING PARAGRAPH WRITING TIPS

●      Each paragraph should focus on a single main idea

●      Paragraphs should follow a logical sequence; students should group similar ideas together to avoid incoherence

●      Paragraphs should be denoted consistently; students should choose either to indent or skip a line

●      Transition words and phrases such as alternatively , consequently , in contrast should be used to give flow and provide a bridge between paragraphs.

HOW TO EDIT AN ESSAY

Students shouldn’t expect their essays to emerge from the writing process perfectly formed. Except in exam situations and the like, thorough editing is an essential aspect in the writing process. 

Often, students struggle with this aspect of the process the most. After spending hours of effort on planning, research, and writing the first draft, students can be reluctant to go back over the same terrain they have so recently travelled. It is important at this point to give them some helpful guidelines to help them to know what to look out for. The following tips will provide just such help: 

One Piece at a Time: There is a lot to look out for in the editing process and often students overlook aspects as they try to juggle too many balls during the process. One effective strategy to combat this is for students to perform a number of rounds of editing with each focusing on a different aspect. For example, the first round could focus on content, the second round on looking out for word repetition (use a thesaurus to help here), with the third attending to spelling and grammar.

Sum It Up: When reviewing the paragraphs they have written, a good starting point is for students to read each paragraph and attempt to sum up its main point in a single line. If this is not possible, their readers will most likely have difficulty following their train of thought too and the paragraph needs to be overhauled.

Let It Breathe: When possible, encourage students to allow some time for their essay to ‘breathe’ before returning to it for editing purposes. This may require some skilful time management on the part of the student, for example, a student rush-writing the night before the deadline does not lend itself to effective editing. Fresh eyes are one of the sharpest tools in the writer’s toolbox.

Read It Aloud: This time-tested editing method is a great way for students to identify mistakes and typos in their work. We tend to read things more slowly when reading aloud giving us the time to spot errors. Also, when we read silently our minds can often fill in the gaps or gloss over the mistakes that will become apparent when we read out loud.

Phone a Friend: Peer editing is another great way to identify errors that our brains may miss when reading our own work. Encourage students to partner up for a little ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours’.

Use Tech Tools: We need to ensure our students have the mental tools to edit their own work and for this they will need a good grasp of English grammar and punctuation. However, there are also a wealth of tech tools such as spellcheck and grammar checks that can offer a great once-over option to catch anything students may have missed in earlier editing rounds.

Putting the Jewels on Display: While some struggle to edit, others struggle to let go. There comes a point when it is time for students to release their work to the reader. They must learn to relinquish control after the creation is complete. This will be much easier to achieve if the student feels that they have done everything in their control to ensure their essay is representative of the best of their abilities and if they have followed the advice here, they should be confident they have done so.

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How to Write a Literacy Narrative – Explained With Examples

A literacy narrative is a form of free writing that brings life experiences into account.

Piece of Advice

It is easy to write in difficult words, but difficult to write in easy words. ― Anonymous

A literacy narrative is a first-hand narrative about reading, writing, teaching, and composing in any form of context. It is a form of autobiographical writing such as an essay, which can help you learn and evaluate the role of literacy in your life. It can unravel your attitudes and abilities, along with how you have developed as a reader, writer, thinker, and communicator.

It can prompt you to explore and reminisce the choices, moments, experiences, or stages of your personal development. It will also help you realize your growth in terms of writing, reading, communicating, thinking, and even listening.

It allows you to be face to face with your life’s influential events, scenes, people, stages in your life, turning points, epiphanies, failures, successes, passages into new, different kinds of language, reading, writing, communication, and thinking. It can be sad, happy, remorseful, funny, informative, incidental, etc.

It could also be an account of your triumphs, when someone gave you a chance, or you lost chances, and life’s lessons that you learned or that were taught to you by people at the church, school, performances, presentations, etc.

Tips for Writing a Literacy Narrative

You need to remember that literacy narratives are theme-based and open-formed, and do not have a strict structure or thesis.

✑ Choose a topic that means something to you. You could write about personal challenges like overcoming difficulties, early memories of listening to a story or reading it, or simply write about your favorite book, poem, etc.

✑ Make a list of a few ideas that you would like to cover in your literacy narrative. These should be written in a sentence form. This is because a literacy narrative is not just about writing about your favorite literature, it is more personal than that. It is about realizing why you liked reading the literature, what attracted you to it, etc.

✑ Begin writing the first draft of your very first literacy narrative. Do not go astray from your topic; stay focused on the theme. If you are unsure about your theme, work on it simultaneously.

✑ Revise the draft and clear any mistakes that you’ve made.

✑ Use a lot of imagery as this will transform your audiences to your memory, allowing them to connect to you, your experiences, and events. This method is also known as reflecting.

✑ Describe everything well and use other sensory details, viz., smell, touch, and taste.

✑ Give a suitable title for the paper.

✑ Include some dialogs as this keeps the reader/listener captivated to the literature.

✑ Get a peer to review it.

✑ If required, reedit your literacy narrative with the help of your seniors, parents, teachers, etc.

✑ Give it another good read and you are done writing your literacy narrative.

Things to Remember

You will need to ask the following questions time and again while and after writing your narrative.

✑ What do I want to do? What do I want to convey?

✑ What were the crucial moments and details in the event?

✑ Does my literacy narrative have a title?

✑ Am I staying on the topic?

✑ Does this make sense to someone who doesn’t know anything about me or a literacy narrative?

✑ Describe the characters and settings well.

✑ Does it have an open-form structure?

✑ Is it generic or does it have some personal experiences?

✑ Have I used sufficient examples?

✑ Is it appropriate for my audience? As in, is the diction, tone, and language appropriate for the purpose of my literacy narrative? Is it too casual or too formal?

✑ Is it clear? Are the terminologies, examples, events, etc., understandable?

An Example of a Literacy Narrative

Power of a prayer.

One winter, when I was eight years old, my father and I had taken a ride to aunt Sally’s house. Halfway back home, the car began to wobble and slow down. Dad realized that the car had a flat tire. To make things worse, we were stranded in the middle of a snowstorm. I could hear the helplessness in my dad’s voice as he said, “We could sure use a Christmas miracle right about now.” I remember how much I detested that old red car, mainly because the radio didn’t work. Nothing really worked in that car, but luckily, dad got his miracle! The heater suddenly sprung into action and we were quiet thankful that we didn’t freeze to death. We waited there in the middle of nowhere for someone to come along and help us out.

The cold wind started blowing in through the little gap in the door frame and the window. It whistled and moaned and scared me half to death. The breeze that blew in was pricking my nose and cheeks. I could smell the pine tree in the air; given the fact that we had one tied to the roof, Christmas was just a few days away. Dad and I both began search for some way to clog that thin gap to keep the cold out. As I reached into my jacket pocket, I realized there was a piece of folded paper in it. I pulled it out, only to realize that it was the lyrics of the carol, Hallelujah. I was overcome with the sudden burst of the singing spell, and I began to sing it. Dad too pitched in now and then. By the time I sang Hallelujah after the second verse, the cold winds had stopped. As we sang, “… and every breath we drew was hallelujah”, we heard a familiar honk coming from behind us. And what do you know, it was my Uncle Mitch coming our way with help!

Topics for a Literacy Narrative

✑ What is your earliest memory of learning to read or write?

✑ Which story or book was significant to you in your adolescent life?

✑ Who taught you to write?

✑ How did your attitude towards reading and writing develop?

✑ The first time I wrote a letter/love letter/poem/novel.

✑ The time I won or lost a crucial debate.

✑ The time I forgot my lines in a play.

✑ The first time you wrote something on your own.

✑ My favorite bedtime story as a child.

✑ The time I felt like an illiterate.

✑ The time I won a prize for reading/writing.

✑ The time I got my first computer/Facebook account/e-mail account, etc.

✑ The first time I recited holy scriptures at the church/temple/or at my Bar or Bat Mitzvah.

Remember this little piece of advice―you can write anything using a complex and difficult language. But, the point behind your writing will not be achieved if the listener/reader of your work is unable to comprehend it. Keep your language clear, plain, and simple as this will help your message to be understood easily.

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What Makes a Good Literature Paper?

An argument.

When you write an extended literary essay, often one requiring research, you are essentially making an argument. You are arguing that your perspective-an interpretation, an evaluative judgment, or a critical evaluation-is a valid one.

A debatable thesis statement

Like any argument paper you have ever written for a first-year composition course, you must have a specific, detailed thesis statement that reveals your perspective, and, like any good argument, your perspective must be one which is debatable.

You would not want to make an argument of this sort:

Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play about a young man who seeks revenge. That doesn't say anything-it's basically just a summary and is hardly debatable.

A better thesis would be this:

Hamlet experiences internal conflict because he is in love with his mother. That is debatable, controversial even. The rest of a paper with this argument as its thesis will be an attempt to show, using specific examples from the text and evidence from scholars, (1) how Hamlet is in love with his mother, (2) why he's in love with her, and (3) what implications there are for reading the play in this manner.

You also want to avoid a thesis statement like this:

Spirituality means different things to different people. King Lear , The Book of Romans , and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance each view the spirit differently. Again, that says nothing that's not already self-evident. Why bother writing a paper about that? You're not writing an essay to list works that have nothing in common other than a general topic like "spirituality." You want to find certain works or authors that, while they may have several differences, do have some specific, unifying point. That point is your thesis.

Lear , Romans , and Zen each view the soul as the center of human personality. Then you prove it, using examples from the texts that show that the soul is the center of personality.

Chapter 1. What is Literacy? Multiple Perspectives on Literacy

Constance Beecher

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglass

Download Tar Beach – Faith Ringgold Video Transcript [DOC]

Keywords: literacy, digital literacy, critical literacy, community-based literacies

Definitions of literacy from multiple perspectives

Literacy is the cornerstone of education by any definition. Literacy refers to the ability of people to read and write (UNESCO, 2017). Reading and writing in turn are about encoding and decoding information between written symbols and sound (Resnick, 1983; Tyner, 1998). More specifically, literacy is the ability to understand the relationship between sounds and written words such that one may read, say, and understand them (UNESCO, 2004; Vlieghe, 2015). About 67 percent of children nationwide, and more than 80 percent of those from families with low incomes, are not proficient readers by the end of third grade ( The Nation Assessment for Educational Progress; NAEP 2022 ).  Children who are not reading on grade level by third grade are 4 times more likely to drop out of school than their peers who are reading on grade level. A large body of research clearly demonstrates that Americans with fewer years of education have poorer health and shorter lives. In fact, since the 1990s, life expectancy has fallen for people without a high school education. Completing more years of education creates better access to health insurance, medical care, and the resources for living a healthier life (Saha, 2006). Americans with less education face higher rates of illness, higher rates of disability, and shorter life expectancies. In the U.S., 25-year-olds without a high school diploma can expect to die 9 years sooner than college graduates. For example, by 2011, the prevalence of diabetes had reached 15% for adults without a high -school education, compared with 7% for college graduates (Zimmerman et al., 2018).

Thus, literacy is a goal of utmost importance to society. But what does it mean to be literate, or to be able to read? What counts as literacy?

Learning Objectives

• Describe two or more definitions of literacy and the differences between them.
• Define digital and critical literacy.
• Distinguish between digital literacy, critical literacy, and community-based literacies.
• Explain multiple perspectives on literacy.

Here are some definitions to consider:

“Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” – United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

“The ability to understand, use, and respond appropriately to written texts.” – National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), citing the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)

“An individual’s ability to read, write, and speak in English, compute, and solve problems, at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual, and in society.” – Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), Section 203

“The ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” – Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), as cited by the American Library Association’s Committee on Literacy

“Using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” – Kutner, Greenberg, Jin, Boyle, Hsu, & Dunleavy (2007). Literacy in Everyday Life: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NCES 2007-480)

Which one of these above definitions resonates with you? Why?

New literacy practices as meaning-making practices

In the 21 st century, literacy increasingly includes understanding the roles of digital media and technology in literacy. In 1996, the New London Group coined the term “multiliteracies” or “new literacies” to describe a modern view of literacy that reflected multiple communication forms and contexts of cultural and linguistic diversity within a globalized society. They defined multiliteracies as a combination of multiple ways of communicating and making meaning, including such modes as visual, audio, spatial, behavioral, and gestural (New London Group, 1996). Most of the text’s students come across today are digital (like this textbook!). Instead of books and magazines, students are reading blogs and text messages.

For a short video on the importance of digital literacy, watch The New Media Literacies .

The National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE, 2019) makes it clear that our definitions of literacy must continue to evolve and grow ( NCTE definition of digital literacy ).

“Literacy has always been a collection of communicative and sociocultural practices shared among communities. As society and technology change, so does literacy. The world demands that a literate person possess and intentionally apply a wide range of skills, competencies, and dispositions. These literacies are interconnected, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with histories, narratives, life possibilities, and social trajectories of all individuals and groups. Active, successful participants in a global society must be able to:

• participate effectively and critically in a networked world.
• explore and engage critically and thoughtfully across a wide variety of inclusive texts and tools/modalities.
• consume, curate, and create actively across contexts.
• advocate for equitable access to and accessibility of texts, tools, and information.
• build and sustain intentional global and cross-cultural connections and relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought.
• promote culturally sustaining communication and recognize the bias and privilege present in the interactions.
• examine the rights, responsibilities, and ethical implications of the use and creation of information.
• determine how and to what extent texts and tools amplify one’s own and others’ narratives as well as counterproductive narratives.
• recognize and honor the multilingual literacy identities and culture experiences individuals bring to learning environments, and provide opportunities to promote, amplify, and encourage these variations of language (e.g., dialect, jargon, and register).”

In other words, literacy is not just the ability to read and write. It is also being able to effectively use digital technology to find and analyze information. Students who are digitally literate know how to do research, find reliable sources, and make judgments about what they read online and in print. Next, we will learn more about digital literacy.

• Malleable : can be changed.
• Culturally sustaining : the pedagogical preservation of the cultural and linguistic competence of young people pertaining to their communities of origin while simultaneously affording dominant-culture competence.
• Bias : a tendency to believe that some people, ideas, etc., are better than others, usually resulting in unfair treatment.
• Privilege : a right or benefit that is given to some people and not to others.
• Unproductive narrative : negative commonly held beliefs such as “all students from low-income backgrounds will struggle in school.” (Narratives are phrases or ideas that are repeated over and over and become “shared narratives.” You can spot them in common expressions and stories that almost everyone knows and holds as ingrained values or beliefs.)

Literacy in the digital age

The Iowa Core recognizes that today, literacy includes technology. The goal for students who graduate from the public education system in Iowa is:

“Each Iowa student will be empowered with the technological knowledge and skills to learn effectively and live productively. This vision, developed by the Iowa Core 21st Century Skills Committee, reflects the fact that Iowans in the 21st century live in a global environment marked by a high use of technology, giving citizens and workers the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions as never before. Iowa’s students live in a media-suffused environment, marked by access to an abundance of information and rapidly changing technological tools useful for critical thinking and problem-solving processes. Therefore, technological literacy supports preparation of students as global citizens capable of self-directed learning in preparation for an ever-changing world” (Iowa Core Standards 21 st Century Skills, n.d.).

NOTE: The essential concepts and skills of technology literacy are taken from the International Society for Technology in Education’s National Educational Technology Standards for Students: Grades K-2 | Technology Literacy Standards

Literacy in any context is defined as the ability “ to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge society” (ICT Literacy Panel, 2002). “ When we teach only for facts (specifics)… rather than for how to go beyond facts, we teach students how to get out of date ” (Sternberg, 2008). This statement is particularly significant when applied to technology literacy. The Iowa essential concepts for technology literacy reflect broad, universal processes and skills.

Unlike the previous generations, learning in the digital age is marked using rapidly evolving technology, a deluge of information, and a highly networked global community (Dede, 2010). In such a dynamic environment, learners need skills beyond the basic cognitive ability to consume and process language. To understand the characteristics of the digital age, and what this means for how people learn in this new and changing landscape, one may turn to the evolving discussion of literacy or, as one might say now, of digital literacy. The history of literacy contextualizes digital literacy and illustrates changes in literacy over time. By looking at literacy as an evolving historical phenomenon, we can glean the fundamental characteristics of the digital age. These characteristics in turn illuminate the skills needed to take advantage of digital environments. The following discussion is an overview of digital literacy, its essential components, and why it is important for learning in the digital age.

Literacy is often considered a skill or competency. Children and adults alike can spend years developing the appropriate skills for encoding and decoding information. Over the course of thousands of years, literacy has become much more common and widespread, with a global literacy rate ranging from 81% to 90% depending on age and gender (UNESCO, 2016). From a time when literacy was the domain of an elite few, it has grown to include huge swaths of the global population. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which are some of the advantages the written word can provide. Kaestle (1985) tells us that “literacy makes it possible to preserve information as a snapshot in time, allows for recording, tracking and remembering information, and sharing information more easily across distances among others” (p. 16). In short, literacy led “to the replacement of myth by history and the replacement of magic by skepticism and science.”

If literacy involves the skills of reading and writing, digital literacy requires the ability to extend those skills to effectively take advantage of the digital world (American Library Association [ALA], 2013). More general definitions express digital literacy as the ability to read and understand information from digital sources as well as to create information in various digital formats (Bawden, 2008; Gilster, 1997; Tyner, 1998; UNESCO, 2004). Developing digital skills allows digital learners to manage a vast array of rapidly changing information and is key to both learning and working in the evolving digital landscape (Dede, 2010; Koltay, 2011; Mohammadyari & Singh, 2015). As such, it is important for people to develop certain competencies specifically for handling digital content.

ALA Digital Literacy Framework

To fully understand the many digital literacies, we will look at the American Library Association (ALA) framework. The ALA framework is laid out in terms of basic functions with enough specificity to make it easy to understand and remember but broad enough to cover a wide range of skills. The ALA framework includes the following areas:

• understanding,
• evaluating,
• creating, and
• communicating (American Library Association, 2013).

Finding information in a digital environment represents a significant departure from the way human beings have searched for information for centuries. The learner must abandon older linear or sequential approaches to finding information such as reading a book, using a card catalog, index, or table of contents, and instead use more horizontal approaches like natural language searches, hypermedia text, keywords, search engines, online databases and so on (Dede, 2010; Eshet, 2002). The shift involves developing the ability to create meaningful search limits (SCONUL, 2016). Previously, finding the information would have meant simply looking up page numbers based on an index or sorting through a card catalog. Although finding information may depend to some degree on the search tool being used (library, internet search engine, online database, etc.) the search results also depend on how well a person is able to generate appropriate keywords and construct useful Boolean searches. Failure in these two areas could easily return too many results to be helpful, vague, or generic results, or potentially no useful results at all (Hangen, 2015).

Part of the challenge of finding information is the ability to manage the results. Because there is so much data, changing so quickly, in so many different formats, it can be challenging to organize and store them in such a way as to be useful. SCONUL (2016) talks about this as the ability to organize, store, manage, and cite digital resources, while the Educational Testing Service also specifically mentions the skills of accessing and managing information. Some ways to accomplish these tasks is using social bookmarking tools such as Diigo, clipping and organizing software such as Evernote and OneNote, and bibliographic software. Many sites, such as YouTube, allow individuals with an account to bookmark videos, as well as create channels or collections of videos for specific topics or uses. Other websites have similar features.

Understanding

Understanding in the context of digital literacy perhaps most closely resembles traditional literacy because it is the ability to read and interpret text (Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan, 2006). In the digital age, however, the ability to read and understand extends much further than text alone. For example, searches may return results with any combination of text, video, sound, and audio, as well as still and moving pictures. As the internet has evolved, a whole host of visual languages have also evolved, such as moving images, emoticons, icons, data visualizations, videos, and combinations of all the above. Lankshear & Knoble (2008) refer to these modes of communication as “post typographic textual practice.” Understanding the variety of modes of digital material may also be referred to as multimedia literacy (Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan, 2006), visual literacy (Tyner, 1998), or digital literacy (Buckingham, 2006).

Evaluating digital media requires competencies ranging from assessing the importance of a piece of information to determining its accuracy and source. Evaluating information is not new to the digital age, but the nature of digital information can make it more difficult to understand who the source of information is and whether it can be trusted (Jenkins, 2018). When there are abundant and rapidly changing data across heavily populated networks, anyone with access can generate information online. This results in the learner needing to make decisions about its authenticity, trustworthiness, relevance, and significance. Learning evaluative digital skills means learning to ask questions about who is writing the information, why they are writing it, and who the intended audience is (Buckingham, 2006). Developing critical thinking skills is part of the literacy of evaluating and assessing the suitability for use of a specific piece of information (SCONUL, 2016).

Creating in the digital world makes the production of knowledge and ideas in digital formats explicit. While writing is a critical component of traditional literacy, it is not the only creative tool in the digital toolbox. Other tools are available and include creative activities such as podcasting, making audio-visual presentations, building data visualizations, 3D printing, and writing blogs. Tools that haven’t been thought of before are constantly appearing. In short, a digitally literate individual will want to be able to use all formats in which digital information may be conveyed in the creation of a product. A key component of creating with digital tools is understanding what constitutes fair use and what is considered plagiarism. While this is not new to the digital age, it may be more challenging these days to find the line between copying and extending someone else’s work.

In part, the reason for the increased difficulty in discerning between plagiarism and new work is the “cut and paste culture” of the Internet, referred to as “reproduction literacy” (Eshet 2002, p.4), or appropriation in Jenkins’ New Media Literacies (Jenkins, 2018). The question is, what kind and how much change is required to avoid the accusation of plagiarism? This skill requires the ability to think critically, evaluate a work, and make appropriate decisions. There are tools and information to help understand and find those answers, such as the Creative Commons. Learning about such resources and how to use them is part of digital literacy.

Communicating

Communicating is the final category of digital skills in the ALA digital framework. The capacity to connect with individuals all over the world creates unique opportunities for learning and sharing information, for which developing digital communication skills is vital. Some of the skills required for communicating in the digital environment include digital citizenship, collaboration, and cultural awareness. This is not to say that one does not need to develop communication skills outside of the digital environment, but that the skills required for digital communication go beyond what is required in a non-digital environment. Most of us are adept at personal, face- to-face communication, but digital communication needs the ability to engage in asynchronous environments such as email, online forums, blogs, social media, and learning platforms where what is written may not be deleted and may be misinterpreted. Add that to an environment where people number in the millions and the opportunities for misunderstanding and cultural miscues are likely.

The communication category of digital literacies covers an extensive array of skills above and beyond what one might need for face-to-face interactions. It is comprised of competencies around ethical and moral behavior, responsible communication for engagement in social and civic activities (Adam Becker et al., 2017), an awareness of audience, and an ability to evaluate the potential impact of one’s online actions. It also includes skills for handling privacy and security in online environments. These activities fall into two main categories: digital citizenship and collaboration.

Digital citizenship refers to one’s ability to interact effectively in the digital world. Part of this skill is good manners, often referred to as “netiquette.” There is a level of context which is often missing in digital communication due to physical distance, lack of personal familiarity with the people online, and the sheer volume of the people who may encounter our words. People who know us well may understand exactly what we mean when we say something sarcastic or ironic, but people online do not know us, and vocal and facial cues are missing in most digital communication, making it more likely we will be misunderstood. Furthermore, we are more likely to misunderstand or be misunderstood if we are unaware of cultural differences. So, digital citizenship includes an awareness of who we are, what we intend to say, and how it might be perceived by other people we do not know (Buckingham, 2006). It is also a process of learning to communicate clearly in ways that help others understand what we mean.

Another key digital skill is collaboration, and it is essential for effective participation in digital projects via the Internet. The Internet allows people to engage with others they may never see in person and work towards common goals, be they social, civic, or business oriented. Creating a community and working together requires a degree of trust and familiarity that can be difficult to build when there is physical distance between the participants. Greater effort must be made to be inclusive , and to overcome perceived or actual distance and disconnectedness. So, while the potential of digital technology for connecting people is impressive, it is not automatic or effortless, and it requires new skills.

Literacy narratives are stories about reading or composing a message in any form or context. They often include poignant memories that involve a personal experience with literacy. Digital literacy narratives can sometimes be categorized as ones that focus on how the writer came to understand the importance of technology in their life or pedagogy. More often, they are simply narratives that use a medium beyond the print-based essay to tell the story:

Create your own literacy narrative that tells of a significant experience you had with digital literacy. Use a multi-modal tool that includes audio and images or video. Share it with your classmates and discuss the most important ideas you notice in each other’s narratives.

Critical literacy

Literacy scholars recognize that although literacy is a cognitive skill, it is also a set of practices that communities and people participate in. Next, we turn to another perspective on literacy – critical literacy. “Critical” here is not meant as having a negative point of view, but rather using an analytic lens that detects power, privilege, and representation to understand different ways of looking at texts. For example, when groups or individuals stage a protest, do the media refer to them as “protesters” or “rioters?” What is the reason for choosing the label they do, and what are the consequences? 

Critical literacy does not have a set definition or typical history of use, but the following key tenets have been described in the literature, which will vary in their application based on the individual social context (Vasquez, 2019). Table 1 presents some key aspects of critical literacy, but this area of literacy research is growing and evolving rapidly, so this is not an exhaustive list.

An important component of critical literacy is the adoption of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy. One definition comes from Dr. Django Paris (2012), who stated that Culturally Responsive-Sustaining (CR-S) education recognizes that cultural differences (including racial, ethnic, linguistic, gender, sexuality, and ability ones) should be treated as assets for teaching and learning. Culturally sustaining pedagogy requires teachers to support multilingualism and multiculturalism in their practice. That is, culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literary, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling.

For more, see the Culturally Responsive and Sustaining F ramework . The framework helps educators to think about how to create student-centered learning environments that uphold racial, linguistic, and cultural identities. It prepares students for rigorous independent learning, develops their abilities to connect across lines of difference, elevates historically marginalized voices, and empowers them as agents of social change. CR-S education explores the relationships between historical and contemporary conditions of inequality and the ideas that shape access, participation, and outcomes for learners.

• What can you do to learn more about your students’ cultures?
• How can you build and sustain relationships with your students?
• How do the instructional materials you use affirm your students’ identities?

Community-based literacies

You may have noticed that communities are a big part of critical literacy – we understand that our environment and culture impact what we read and how we understand the world. Now think about the possible differences among three Iowa communities: a neighborhood in the middle of Des Moines, the rural community of New Hartford, and Coralville, a suburb of Iowa City:

You may not have thought about how living in a certain community might contribute to or take away from a child’s ability to learn to read. Dr. Susan Neuman (2001) did. She and her team investigated the differences between two neighborhoods regarding how much access to books and other reading materials children in those neighborhoods had. One middle-to-upper class neighborhood in Philadelphia had large bookstores, toy stores with educational materials, and well-resourced libraries. The other, a low-income neighborhood, had no bookstores or toy stores. There was a library, but it had fewer resources and served a larger number of patrons. In fact, the team found that even the signs on the businesses were harder to read, and there was less environmental printed word. Their findings showed that each child in the middle-class neighborhood had 13 books on average, while in the lower-class neighborhood there was one book per 300 children .

Dr. Neuman and her team (2019) recently revisited this question. This time, they looked at low-income neighborhoods – those where 60% or more of the people are living in poverty . They compared these to borderline neighborhoods – those with 20-40% in poverty – in three cities, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Los Angeles. Again, they found significantly fewer books in the very low-income areas. The chart represents the preschool books available for sale in each neighborhood. Note that in the lower-income neighborhood of Washington D.C., there were no books for young children to be found at all!

Now watch this video from Campaign for Grade Level Reading. Access to books is one way that children can have new experiences, but it is not the only way!

What is the “summer slide,” and how does it contribute to the differences in children’s reading abilities?

The importance of being literate and how to get there

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope” – Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General.

Our economy is enhanced when citizens have higher literacy levels. Effective literacy skills open the doors to more educational and employment opportunities so that people can lift themselves out of poverty and chronic underemployment. In our increasingly complex and rapidly changing technological world, it is essential that individuals continuously expand their knowledge and learn new skills to keep up with the pace of change. The goal of our public school system in the United States is to “ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live.” This is the basis of the Common Core Standards, developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center). These groups felt that education was too inconsistent across the different states, and today’s students are preparing to enter a world in which colleges and businesses are demanding more than ever before. To ensure that all students are ready for success after high school, the Common Core State Standards established clear universal guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade: “The Common Core State Standards do not tell teachers how to teach, but they do help teachers figure out the knowledge and skills their students should have” (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2012).

Explore the Core!

Go to iowacore.gov and click on Literacy Standards. Spend some time looking at the K-3 standards. Notice how consistent they are across the grade levels. Each has specific requirements within the categories:

• Reading Standards for Literature
• Reading Standards for Informational Text
• Reading Standards for Foundational Skills
• Writing Standards
• Speaking and Listening Standards
• Language Standards

Download the Iowa Core K-12 Literacy Manual . You will use it as a reference when you are creating lessons.

Next, explore the Subject Area pages and resources. What tools does the state provide to teachers to support their use of the Core?

Describe a resource you found on the website. How will you use this when you are a teacher?

Watch this video about the Iowa Literacy Core Standards:

• Literacy is typically defined as the ability to ingest, understand, and communicate information.
• Literacy has multiple definitions, each with a different point of focus.
• “New literacies,” or multiliteracies, are a combination of multiple ways of communicating and making meaning, including visual, audio, spatial, behavioral, and gestural communication.
• As online communication has become more prevalent, digital literacy has become more important for learners to engage with the wealth of information available online.
• Critical literacy develops learners’ critical thinking by asking them to use an analytic lens that detects power, privilege, and representation to understand different ways of looking at information.
• The Common Core State Standards were established to set clear, universal guidelines for what every student should know after completing high school.

Resources for teacher educators

• Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework [PDF]
• Common Core State Standards
• Iowa Core Instructional Resources in Literacy

Gonzalez, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2006). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms . New York, NY: Routledge.

Lau, S. M. C. (2012). Reconceptualizing critical literacy teaching in ESL classrooms. The Reading Teacher, 65 , 325–329.

Literacy. (2018, March 19). Retrieved March 2, 2020, from  https://en.unesco.org/themes/literacy

Neuman, S. B., & Celano, D. (2001). Access to print in low‐income and middle‐income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36 (1), 8-26.

Neuman, S. B., & Moland, N. (2019). Book deserts: The consequences of income segregation on children’s access to print.  Urban education, 54 (1), 126-147.

New London Group (1996). A Pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.  Harvard Educational Review, 66 (1), 60-92.

O’Brien, J. (2001). Children reading critically: A local history. In B. Comber & A. Simpson (Eds.), Negotiating critical literacies in classrooms (pp. 41–60). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ordoñez-Jasis, R., & Ortiz, R. W. (2006). Reading their worlds: Working with diverse families to enhance children’s early literacy development. Y C Young Children, 61 (1), 42.

Saha S. (2006). Improving literacy as a means to reducing health disparities. J Gen Intern Med. 21 (8):893-895. doi:10.1111/j.1525-1497.2006.00546.x

UNESCO. (2017). Literacy rates continue to rise from one generation to the next global literacy trends today. Retrieved from http://on.unesco.org/literacy-map.

Vasquez, V.M., Janks, H. & Comber, B. (2019). Critical Literacy as a Way of Being and Doing. Language Arts, 96 (5), 300-311.

Vlieghe, J. (2015). Traditional and digital literacy. The literacy hypothesis, technologies of reading and writing, and the ‘grammatized’ body. Ethics and Education, 10 (2), 209-226.

Zimmerman, E. B., Woolf, S. H., Blackburn, S. M., Kimmel, A. D., Barnes, A. J., & Bono, R. S. (2018). The case for considering education and health. Urban Education, 53 (6), 744-773.U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences.

U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2022 Reading Assessment.

Methods of Teaching Early Literacy Copyright © 2023 by Constance Beecher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

3.3 Glance at Genre: The Literacy Narrative

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Read and compose in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes.
• Match the capacities of different environments to varying rhetorical situations.

Over time, people have developed specific ways of writing for particular rhetorical situations. These distinctive ways of writing can be referred to in part as genres. You may have heard the term genre in reference to publishing categories, such as novels or memoirs, but the term can refer to any type of writing that conforms to specific forms and benchmarks. Many genres include stories of different kinds—for example, folktales, short stories, accounts of events, and biographies. As author Jonathan Gottschall says in his 2012 book of the same title, humankind is “the storytelling animal”; people of all cultures have engaged in telling stories, both as storytellers and as audience members. Simply put, narrative stories are essential to many genres of writing.

Exploring Narrative: Elements of Storytelling

Narratives, whether about literacy or anything else, include these key elements:

• Plot. Authors of narratives tell about one or more events. In fiction, the plot is the sequence of those events. In nonfiction, a plot is often referred to simply as the events, but nonfiction texts follow similar plot patterns, including exposition or introduction, a series of events leading to a climax or discovery, and events following the climax or discovery.
• Characters. The events in the story happen to characters, or individuals who are part of the story. In nonfiction, these characters are usually real people. The audience should feel a connection to the main character or characters. Readers may like or dislike characters, blame them or feel sorry for them, identify with them or not. Skilled writers portray characters through the use of dialogue, actions or behavior, and thoughts so that readers can understand what these individuals are like.
• Setting. Stories, fiction and nonfiction, take place in settings, which include locations, time periods, and the cultures in which the characters or real people are immersed.
• Problem and Resolution. In narratives, the characters generally encounter one or more problems. The tension caused by the problem builds to a climax. The resolution of the problem and the built-up tension usually occurs near the end of the story.
• Story Arc. Most narratives have a story arc—a beginning, a middle, and an end—but not necessarily in that order. The story arc, or order of events, may occur chronologically, or the story may begin in the middle of the action and explain earlier events later in the sequence.

Specific Details and Other Conventions

To immerse the audience in the story, authors provide specific details of the scenes and action. Many authors, and teachers, call this strategy “showing, not telling.” These aspects can include the following elements:

• Sensory Details: Full, literal or figurative descriptions of the things that the characters see, smell, hear, touch, and taste in their surroundings.
• Dialogue: Conversation between characters.
• Action: Vivid portrayal of the events in the story. Writers often use short sentences and strong verbs to indicate physical or mental action.
• Engaging Language: Sentence structure and word choices, including tone (vocal attitude of the narrator or characters), diction (language used by the narrator or characters), and varied constructions (different kinds of sentences), that provide specific, clear, and compelling information for the audience.

Establishing the Significance

Most importantly, the audience must feel that the story has some significance. While the author’s main point may only be implied, rather than stated outright as in a conventional academic essay, readers should understand the point of the story and believe that it matters.

For example, in the prologue to her memoir about the importance of education for girls, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (2013), Malala Yousafzai (b. 1997) writes, “The day when everything changed was Tuesday, 9 October 2012.” Yousafzai provides reference to an exact date, the precise moment when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head because she had spoken publicly in favor of girls’ right to education. Identifying the date in this way is a technique that serves a variety of purposes. This technique provides a focal point to draw the audience into the story, identifies details that serve as rising action that the audience can assume will culminate on this date, marks the setting in both time and place for the audience, and ultimately foreshadows a climax of action for the reader. The following elements, therefore, are crucial for writers of narratives to consider when creating content for their writing.

• Audience. Narratives are designed to appeal to specific audiences; authors choose storytelling elements, details, and language strategies to engage the target audience.
• Purpose. Authors may tell stories for different reasons: to entertain, to reinforce cultural norms, to educate, or to strengthen social ties. The same story may, and often does, fulfill more than one purpose.

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Literacy — The Importance and Role of Literacy in My Life

The Importance and Role of Literacy in My Life

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beginner's guide to literary analysis

Understanding literature & how to write literary analysis.

Literary analysis is the foundation of every college and high school English class. Once you can comprehend written work and respond to it, the next step is to learn how to think critically and complexly about a work of literature in order to analyze its elements and establish ideas about its meaning.

If that sounds daunting, it shouldn’t. Literary analysis is really just a way of thinking creatively about what you read. The practice takes you beyond the storyline and into the motives behind it. 

While an author might have had a specific intention when they wrote their book, there’s still no right or wrong way to analyze a literary text—just your way. You can use literary theories, which act as “lenses” through which you can view a text. Or you can use your own creativity and critical thinking to identify a literary device or pattern in a text and weave that insight into your own argument about the text’s underlying meaning. 

Now, if that sounds fun, it should , because it is. Here, we’ll lay the groundwork for performing literary analysis, including when writing analytical essays, to help you read books like a critic. 

What Is Literary Analysis?

As the name suggests, literary analysis is an analysis of a work, whether that’s a novel, play, short story, or poem. Any analysis requires breaking the content into its component parts and then examining how those parts operate independently and as a whole. In literary analysis, those parts can be different devices and elements—such as plot, setting, themes, symbols, etcetera—as well as elements of style, like point of view or tone. 

When performing analysis, you consider some of these different elements of the text and then form an argument for why the author chose to use them. You can do so while reading and during class discussion, but it’s particularly important when writing essays. 

Literary analysis is notably distinct from summary. When you write a summary , you efficiently describe the work’s main ideas or plot points in order to establish an overview of the work. While you might use elements of summary when writing analysis, you should do so minimally. You can reference a plot line to make a point, but it should be done so quickly so you can focus on why that plot line matters . In summary (see what we did there?), a summary focuses on the “ what ” of a text, while analysis turns attention to the “ how ” and “ why .”

While literary analysis can be broad, covering themes across an entire work, it can also be very specific, and sometimes the best analysis is just that. Literary critics have written thousands of words about the meaning of an author’s single word choice; while you might not want to be quite that particular, there’s a lot to be said for digging deep in literary analysis, rather than wide. 

Although you’re forming your own argument about the work, it’s not your opinion . You should avoid passing judgment on the piece and instead objectively consider what the author intended, how they went about executing it, and whether or not they were successful in doing so. Literary criticism is similar to literary analysis, but it is different in that it does pass judgement on the work. Criticism can also consider literature more broadly, without focusing on a singular work. 

Once you understand what constitutes (and doesn’t constitute) literary analysis, it’s easy to identify it. Here are some examples of literary analysis and its oft-confused counterparts: 

Summary: In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator visits his friend Roderick Usher and witnesses his sister escape a horrible fate.  

Opinion: In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe uses his great Gothic writing to establish a sense of spookiness that is enjoyable to read. 

Literary Analysis: “Throughout ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ Poe foreshadows the fate of Madeline by creating a sense of claustrophobia for the reader through symbols, such as in the narrator’s inability to leave and the labyrinthine nature of the house. 

In summary, literary analysis is:

• Breaking a work into its components
• Identifying what those components are and how they work in the text
• Developing an understanding of how they work together to achieve a goal 
• Not an opinion, but subjective 
• Not a summary, though summary can be used in passing 
• Best when it deeply, rather than broadly, analyzes a literary element

Literary Analysis and Other Works

As discussed above, literary analysis is often performed upon a single work—but it doesn’t have to be. It can also be performed across works to consider the interplay of two or more texts. Regardless of whether or not the works were written about the same thing, or even within the same time period, they can have an influence on one another or a connection that’s worth exploring. And reading two or more texts side by side can help you to develop insights through comparison and contrast.

For example, Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in the 17th century, based largely on biblical narratives written some 700 years before and which later influenced 19th century poet John Keats. The interplay of works can be obvious, as here, or entirely the inspiration of the analyst. As an example of the latter, you could compare and contrast the writing styles of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe who, while contemporaries in terms of time, were vastly different in their content. 

Additionally, literary analysis can be performed between a work and its context. Authors are often speaking to the larger context of their times, be that social, political, religious, economic, or artistic. A valid and interesting form is to compare the author’s context to the work, which is done by identifying and analyzing elements that are used to make an argument about the writer’s time or experience. 

For example, you could write an essay about how Hemingway’s struggles with mental health and paranoia influenced his later work, or how his involvement in the Spanish Civil War influenced his early work. One approach focuses more on his personal experience, while the other turns to the context of his times—both are valid. 

Why Does Literary Analysis Matter? 

Sometimes an author wrote a work of literature strictly for entertainment’s sake, but more often than not, they meant something more. Whether that was a missive on world peace, commentary about femininity, or an allusion to their experience as an only child, the author probably wrote their work for a reason, and understanding that reason—or the many reasons—can actually make reading a lot more meaningful. 

Performing literary analysis as a form of study unquestionably makes you a better reader. It’s also likely that it will improve other skills, too, like critical thinking, creativity, debate, and reasoning. 

At its grandest and most idealistic, literary analysis even has the ability to make the world a better place. By reading and analyzing works of literature, you are able to more fully comprehend the perspectives of others. Cumulatively, you’ll broaden your own perspectives and contribute more effectively to the things that matter to you. 

Literary Terms to Know for Literary Analysis 

There are hundreds of literary devices you could consider during your literary analysis, but there are some key tools most writers utilize to achieve their purpose—and therefore you need to know in order to understand that purpose. These common devices include: 

• Characters: The people (or entities) who play roles in the work. The protagonist is the main character in the work. 
• Conflict: The conflict is the driving force behind the plot, the event that causes action in the narrative, usually on the part of the protagonist
• Context : The broader circumstances surrounding the work political and social climate in which it was written or the experience of the author. It can also refer to internal context, and the details presented by the narrator 
• Diction : The word choice used by the narrator or characters 
• Genre: A category of literature characterized by agreed upon similarities in the works, such as subject matter and tone
• Imagery : The descriptive or figurative language used to paint a picture in the reader’s mind so they can picture the story’s plot, characters, and setting 
• Metaphor: A figure of speech that uses comparison between two unlike objects for dramatic or poetic effect
• Narrator: The person who tells the story. Sometimes they are a character within the story, but sometimes they are omniscient and removed from the plot. 
• Plot : The storyline of the work
• Point of view: The perspective taken by the narrator, which skews the perspective of the reader 
• Setting : The time and place in which the story takes place. This can include elements like the time period, weather, time of year or day, and social or economic conditions 
• Symbol : An object, person, or place that represents an abstract idea that is greater than its literal meaning 
• Syntax : The structure of a sentence, either narration or dialogue, and the tone it implies
• Theme : A recurring subject or message within the work, often commentary on larger societal or cultural ideas
• Tone : The feeling, attitude, or mood the text presents

How to Perform Literary Analysis

Step 1: read the text thoroughly.

Literary analysis begins with the literature itself, which means performing a close reading of the text. As you read, you should focus on the work. That means putting away distractions (sorry, smartphone) and dedicating a period of time to the task at hand. 

It’s also important that you don’t skim or speed read. While those are helpful skills, they don’t apply to literary analysis—or at least not this stage. 

Step 2: Take Notes as You Read  

As you read the work, take notes about different literary elements and devices that stand out to you. Whether you highlight or underline in text, use sticky note tabs to mark pages and passages, or handwrite your thoughts in a notebook, you should capture your thoughts and the parts of the text to which they correspond. This—the act of noticing things about a literary work—is literary analysis. 

Step 3: Notice Patterns 

As you read the work, you’ll begin to notice patterns in the way the author deploys language, themes, and symbols to build their plot and characters. As you read and these patterns take shape, begin to consider what they could mean and how they might fit together. 

As you identify these patterns, as well as other elements that catch your interest, be sure to record them in your notes or text. Some examples include: 

• Circle or underline words or terms that you notice the author uses frequently, whether those are nouns (like “eyes” or “road”) or adjectives (like “yellow” or “lush”).
• Highlight phrases that give you the same kind of feeling. For example, if the narrator describes an “overcast sky,” a “dreary morning,” and a “dark, quiet room,” the words aren’t the same, but the feeling they impart and setting they develop are similar. 
• Underline quotes or prose that define a character’s personality or their role in the text.
• Use sticky tabs to color code different elements of the text, such as specific settings or a shift in the point of view. 

By noting these patterns, comprehensive symbols, metaphors, and ideas will begin to come into focus.  

Step 4: Consider the Work as a Whole, and Ask Questions

This is a step that you can do either as you read, or after you finish the text. The point is to begin to identify the aspects of the work that most interest you, and you could therefore analyze in writing or discussion. 

Questions you could ask yourself include: 

• What aspects of the text do I not understand?
• What parts of the narrative or writing struck me most?
• What patterns did I notice?
• What did the author accomplish really well?
• What did I find lacking?
• Did I notice any contradictions or anything that felt out of place?  
• What was the purpose of the minor characters?
• What tone did the author choose, and why? 

The answers to these and more questions will lead you to your arguments about the text. 

Step 5: Return to Your Notes and the Text for Evidence

As you identify the argument you want to make (especially if you’re preparing for an essay), return to your notes to see if you already have supporting evidence for your argument. That’s why it’s so important to take notes or mark passages as you read—you’ll thank yourself later!

If you’re preparing to write an essay, you’ll use these passages and ideas to bolster your argument—aka, your thesis. There will likely be multiple different passages you can use to strengthen multiple different aspects of your argument. Just be sure to cite the text correctly! 

If you’re preparing for class, your notes will also be invaluable. When your teacher or professor leads the conversation in the direction of your ideas or arguments, you’ll be able to not only proffer that idea but back it up with textual evidence. That’s an A+ in class participation. 

Step 6: Connect These Ideas Across the Narrative

Whether you’re in class or writing an essay, literary analysis isn’t complete until you’ve considered the way these ideas interact and contribute to the work as a whole. You can find and present evidence, but you still have to explain how those elements work together and make up your argument. 

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay

When conducting literary analysis while reading a text or discussing it in class, you can pivot easily from one argument to another (or even switch sides if a classmate or teacher makes a compelling enough argument). 

But when writing literary analysis, your objective is to propose a specific, arguable thesis and convincingly defend it. In order to do so, you need to fortify your argument with evidence from the text (and perhaps secondary sources) and an authoritative tone. 

A successful literary analysis essay depends equally on a thoughtful thesis, supportive analysis, and presenting these elements masterfully. We’ll review how to accomplish these objectives below. 

Step 1: Read the Text. Maybe Read It Again. 

Constructing an astute analytical essay requires a thorough knowledge of the text. As you read, be sure to note any passages, quotes, or ideas that stand out. These could serve as the future foundation of your thesis statement. Noting these sections now will help you when you need to gather evidence. 

The more familiar you become with the text, the better (and easier!) your essay will be. Familiarity with the text allows you to speak (or in this case, write) to it confidently. If you only skim the book, your lack of rich understanding will be evident in your essay. Alternatively, if you read the text closely—especially if you read it more than once, or at least carefully revisit important passages—your own writing will be filled with insight that goes beyond a basic understanding of the storyline. 

Step 2: Brainstorm Potential Topics 

Because you took detailed notes while reading the text, you should have a list of potential topics at the ready. Take time to review your notes, highlighting any ideas or questions you had that feel interesting. You should also return to the text and look for any passages that stand out to you. 

When considering potential topics, you should prioritize ideas that you find interesting. It won’t only make the whole process of writing an essay more fun, your enthusiasm for the topic will probably improve the quality of your argument, and maybe even your writing. Just like it’s obvious when a topic interests you in a conversation, it’s obvious when a topic interests the writer of an essay (and even more obvious when it doesn’t). 

Your topic ideas should also be specific, unique, and arguable. A good way to think of topics is that they’re the answer to fairly specific questions. As you begin to brainstorm, first think of questions you have about the text. Questions might focus on the plot, such as: Why did the author choose to deviate from the projected storyline? Or why did a character’s role in the narrative shift? Questions might also consider the use of a literary device, such as: Why does the narrator frequently repeat a phrase or comment on a symbol? Or why did the author choose to switch points of view each chapter? 

Once you have a thesis question , you can begin brainstorming answers—aka, potential thesis statements . At this point, your answers can be fairly broad. Once you land on a question-statement combination that feels right, you’ll then look for evidence in the text that supports your answer (and helps you define and narrow your thesis statement). 

For example, after reading “ The Fall of the House of Usher ,” you might be wondering, Why are Roderick and Madeline twins?, Or even: Why does their relationship feel so creepy?” Maybe you noticed (and noted) that the narrator was surprised to find out they were twins, or perhaps you found that the narrator’s tone tended to shift and become more anxious when discussing the interactions of the twins.

Once you come up with your thesis question, you can identify a broad answer, which will become the basis for your thesis statement. In response to the questions above, your answer might be, “Poe emphasizes the close relationship of Roderick and Madeline to foreshadow that their deaths will be close, too.” 

Step 3: Gather Evidence 

Once you have your topic (or you’ve narrowed it down to two or three), return to the text (yes, again) to see what evidence you can find to support it. If you’re thinking of writing about the relationship between Roderick and Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” look for instances where they engaged in the text. 

This is when your knowledge of literary devices comes in clutch. Carefully study the language around each event in the text that might be relevant to your topic. How does Poe’s diction or syntax change during the interactions of the siblings? How does the setting reflect or contribute to their relationship? What imagery or symbols appear when Roderick and Madeline are together? 

By finding and studying evidence within the text, you’ll strengthen your topic argument—or, just as valuably, discount the topics that aren’t strong enough for analysis. 

Step 4: Consider Secondary Sources 

In addition to returning to the literary work you’re studying for evidence, you can also consider secondary sources that reference or speak to the work. These can be articles from journals you find on JSTOR, books that consider the work or its context, or articles your teacher shared in class. 

While you can use these secondary sources to further support your idea, you should not overuse them. Make sure your topic remains entirely differentiated from that presented in the source. 

Step 5: Write a Working Thesis Statement

Once you’ve gathered evidence and narrowed down your topic, you’re ready to refine that topic into a thesis statement. As you continue to outline and write your paper, this thesis statement will likely change slightly, but this initial draft will serve as the foundation of your essay. It’s like your north star: Everything you write in your essay is leading you back to your thesis. 

Writing a great thesis statement requires some real finesse. A successful thesis statement is: 

• Debatable : You shouldn’t simply summarize or make an obvious statement about the work. Instead, your thesis statement should take a stand on an issue or make a claim that is open to argument. You’ll spend your essay debating—and proving—your argument. 
• Demonstrable : You need to be able to prove, through evidence, that your thesis statement is true. That means you have to have passages from the text and correlative analysis ready to convince the reader that you’re right. 
• Specific : In most cases, successfully addressing a theme that encompasses a work in its entirety would require a book-length essay. Instead, identify a thesis statement that addresses specific elements of the work, such as a relationship between characters, a repeating symbol, a key setting, or even something really specific like the speaking style of a character. 

Example: By depicting the relationship between Roderick and Madeline to be stifling and almost otherworldly in its closeness, Poe foreshadows both Madeline’s fate and Roderick’s inability to choose a different fate for himself. 

Step 6: Write an Outline 

You have your thesis, you have your evidence—but how do you put them together? A great thesis statement (and therefore a great essay) will have multiple arguments supporting it, presenting different kinds of evidence that all contribute to the singular, main idea presented in your thesis. 

Review your evidence and identify these different arguments, then organize the evidence into categories based on the argument they support. These ideas and evidence will become the body paragraphs of your essay. 

For example, if you were writing about Roderick and Madeline as in the example above, you would pull evidence from the text, such as the narrator’s realization of their relationship as twins; examples where the narrator’s tone of voice shifts when discussing their relationship; imagery, like the sounds Roderick hears as Madeline tries to escape; and Poe’s tendency to use doubles and twins in his other writings to create the same spooky effect. All of these are separate strains of the same argument, and can be clearly organized into sections of an outline. 

Step 7: Write Your Introduction

Your introduction serves a few very important purposes that essentially set the scene for the reader: 

• Establish context. Sure, your reader has probably read the work. But you still want to remind them of the scene, characters, or elements you’ll be discussing. 
• Present your thesis statement. Your thesis statement is the backbone of your analytical paper. You need to present it clearly at the outset so that the reader understands what every argument you make is aimed at. 
• Offer a mini-outline. While you don’t want to show all your cards just yet, you do want to preview some of the evidence you’ll be using to support your thesis so that the reader has a roadmap of where they’re going. 

Step 8: Write Your Body Paragraphs

Thanks to steps one through seven, you’ve already set yourself up for success. You have clearly outlined arguments and evidence to support them. Now it’s time to translate those into authoritative and confident prose. 

When presenting each idea, begin with a topic sentence that encapsulates the argument you’re about to make (sort of like a mini-thesis statement). Then present your evidence and explanations of that evidence that contribute to that argument. Present enough material to prove your point, but don’t feel like you necessarily have to point out every single instance in the text where this element takes place. For example, if you’re highlighting a symbol that repeats throughout the narrative, choose two or three passages where it is used most effectively, rather than trying to squeeze in all ten times it appears. 

While you should have clearly defined arguments, the essay should still move logically and fluidly from one argument to the next. Try to avoid choppy paragraphs that feel disjointed; every idea and argument should feel connected to the last, and, as a group, connected to your thesis. A great way to connect the ideas from one paragraph to the next is with transition words and phrases, such as: 

• Furthermore 
• In addition
• On the other hand
• Conversely 

Step 9: Write Your Conclusion 

Your conclusion is more than a summary of your essay's parts, but it’s also not a place to present brand new ideas not already discussed in your essay. Instead, your conclusion should return to your thesis (without repeating it verbatim) and point to why this all matters. If writing about the siblings in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, you could point out that the utilization of twins and doubles is a common literary element of Poe’s work that contributes to the definitive eeriness of Gothic literature. 

While you might speak to larger ideas in your conclusion, be wary of getting too macro. Your conclusion should still be supported by all of the ideas that preceded it. 

Step 10: Revise, Revise, Revise

Of course you should proofread your literary analysis essay before you turn it in. But you should also edit the content to make sure every piece of evidence and every explanation directly supports your thesis as effectively and efficiently as possible. 

Sometimes, this might mean actually adapting your thesis a bit to the rest of your essay. At other times, it means removing redundant examples or paraphrasing quotations. Make sure every sentence is valuable, and remove those that aren’t. 

Other Resources for Literary Analysis 

With these skills and suggestions, you’re well on your way to practicing and writing literary analysis. But if you don’t have a firm grasp on the concepts discussed above—such as literary devices or even the content of the text you’re analyzing—it will still feel difficult to produce insightful analysis. 

If you’d like to sharpen the tools in your literature toolbox, there are plenty of other resources to help you do so: 

• Check out our expansive library of Literary Devices . These could provide you with a deeper understanding of the basic devices discussed above or introduce you to new concepts sure to impress your professors ( anagnorisis , anyone?). 
• This Academic Citation Resource Guide ensures you properly cite any work you reference in your analytical essay. 
• Our English Homework Help Guide will point you to dozens of resources that can help you perform analysis, from critical reading strategies to poetry helpers. 
• This Grammar Education Resource Guide will direct you to plenty of resources to refine your grammar and writing (definitely important for getting an A+ on that paper). 

Of course, you should know the text inside and out before you begin writing your analysis. In order to develop a true understanding of the work, read through its corresponding SuperSummary study guide . Doing so will help you truly comprehend the plot, as well as provide some inspirational ideas for your analysis.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Letter of Recommendation

What I’ve Learned From My Students’ College Essays

The genre is often maligned for being formulaic and melodramatic, but it’s more important than you think.

By Nell Freudenberger

Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn’t supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they’re afraid that packaging the genuine trauma they’ve experienced is the only way to secure their future. The college counselor at the Brooklyn high school where I’m a writing tutor advises against trauma porn. “Keep it brief , ” she says, “and show how you rose above it.”

I started volunteering in New York City schools in my 20s, before I had kids of my own. At the time, I liked hanging out with teenagers, whom I sometimes had more interesting conversations with than I did my peers. Often I worked with students who spoke English as a second language or who used slang in their writing, and at first I was hung up on grammar. Should I correct any deviation from “standard English” to appeal to some Wizard of Oz behind the curtains of a college admissions office? Or should I encourage students to write the way they speak, in pursuit of an authentic voice, that most elusive of literary qualities?

In fact, I was missing the point. One of many lessons the students have taught me is to let the story dictate the voice of the essay. A few years ago, I worked with a boy who claimed to have nothing to write about. His life had been ordinary, he said; nothing had happened to him. I asked if he wanted to try writing about a family member, his favorite school subject, a summer job? He glanced at his phone, his posture and expression suggesting that he’d rather be anywhere but in front of a computer with me. “Hobbies?” I suggested, without much hope. He gave me a shy glance. “I like to box,” he said.

I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously. Of course the primary goal of a college essay is to help its author get an education that leads to a career. Changes in testing policies and financial aid have made applying to college more confusing than ever, but essays have remained basically the same. I would argue that they’re much more than an onerous task or rote exercise, and that unlike standardized tests they are infinitely variable and sometimes beautiful. College essays also provide an opportunity to learn precision, clarity and the process of working toward the truth through multiple revisions.

When a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously.

Even if writing doesn’t end up being fundamental to their future professions, students learn to choose language carefully and to be suspicious of the first words that come to mind. Especially now, as college students shoulder so much of the country’s ethical responsibility for war with their protest movement, essay writing teaches prospective students an increasingly urgent lesson: that choosing their own words over ready-made phrases is the only reliable way to ensure they’re thinking for themselves.

Teenagers are ideal writers for several reasons. They’re usually free of preconceptions about writing, and they tend not to use self-consciously ‘‘literary’’ language. They’re allergic to hypocrisy and are generally unfiltered: They overshare, ask personal questions and call you out for microaggressions as well as less egregious (but still mortifying) verbal errors, such as referring to weed as ‘‘pot.’’ Most important, they have yet to put down their best stories in a finished form.

I can imagine an essay taking a risk and distinguishing itself formally — a poem or a one-act play — but most kids use a more straightforward model: a hook followed by a narrative built around “small moments” that lead to a concluding lesson or aspiration for the future. I never get tired of working with students on these essays because each one is different, and the short, rigid form sometimes makes an emotional story even more powerful. Before I read Javier Zamora’s wrenching “Solito,” I worked with a student who had been transported by a coyote into the U.S. and was reunited with his mother in the parking lot of a big-box store. I don’t remember whether this essay focused on specific skills or coping mechanisms that he gained from his ordeal. I remember only the bliss of the parent-and-child reunion in that uninspiring setting. If I were making a case to an admissions officer, I would suggest that simply being able to convey that experience demonstrates the kind of resilience that any college should admire.

The essays that have stayed with me over the years don’t follow a pattern. There are some narratives on very predictable topics — living up to the expectations of immigrant parents, or suffering from depression in 2020 — that are moving because of the attention with which the student describes the experience. One girl determined to become an engineer while watching her father build furniture from scraps after work; a boy, grieving for his mother during lockdown, began taking pictures of the sky.

If, as Lorrie Moore said, “a short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage,” what is a college essay? Every once in a while I sit down next to a student and start reading, and I have to suppress my excitement, because there on the Google Doc in front of me is a real writer’s voice. One of the first students I ever worked with wrote about falling in love with another girl in dance class, the absolute magic of watching her move and the terror in the conflict between her feelings and the instruction of her religious middle school. She made me think that college essays are less like love than limerence: one-sided, obsessive, idiosyncratic but profound, the first draft of the most personal story their writers will ever tell.

Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Limits” was published by Knopf last month. She volunteers through the PEN America Writers in the Schools program.

Is AI infiltrating scientific publishing? Rise of ‘suspicious’ tell words popping up in published papers

Researchers are misusing ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots to produce scientific literature. At least, that’s a new fear that some scientists have raised, citing a stark rise in suspicious AI shibboleths showing up in published papers.

Some of these tells—such as the  inadvertent inclusion  of “certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic” in a recent paper in  Surfaces and Interfaces , a journal published by Elsevier—are reasonably obvious evidence that a scientist used an AI chatbot known as a large language model (LLM). But “that’s probably only the tip of the iceberg,” says scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik. (A representative of Elsevier told  Scientific American  that the publisher regrets the situation and is investigating how it could have “slipped through” the manuscript evaluation process.) In most other cases AI involvement isn’t as clear-cut, and automated AI text detectors are  unreliable tools for analyzing a paper.

Researchers from several fields have, however, identified a few key words and phrases (such as “ complex and multifaceted ”) that tend to appear more often in AI-generated sentences than in typical human writing. “When you’ve looked at this stuff long enough, you get a feel for the style,” says Andrew Gray, a librarian and researcher at University College London.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

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