Planning for Literacy Essay:

If Scott were Going to Do this Assignment

 

First: I personally do not often write by beginning with a thesis statement and then brainstorming ideas and finding evidence to support it. The only time this works for me is when I have to write in-class essay examinations, where the essay prompt has a very definite direction to it.

 

Second: I always tend to take notes when I'm reading and when discussions are going on in class. I look over these for any ideas, making sure the ideas "fit in" with the writing assignment.

 

Third: I most often tend to do a lot of brainstorming and see what comes out of this generation of "raw material." So, for example:

1.) I remember the summer reading programs at the local public library when I was in elementary and junior high school. We kept track of how many books we read on a chart on the wall of the library, and those with the most books read at the end of the summer would receive a prize. One year, I got a book bag with a shoulder strap.

2.) I remember losing track of time looking through the bookshelves at my elementary school library. Teachers would bring us to the library for, say, 15-20 minutes to pick out 1-2 books. While other students would rush to their favorite sections and be done in 2 minutes, I would just take my time "browsing" different sections and finding a whole lot of interesting books. Teachers would often have to remind me of the time, and when the time was up I often had many more books than I could check out. I think this is when I began making lists of books I wanted to read.

3.) I don't remember too much about reading and writing or the library in high school. I remember being in the jazz band, and when I needed to write a research paper in 10th grade, I wrote it on the history of jazz. And, luckily, the school library had a lot of books on jazz and no one else was writing about it so I had all the books to myself. I don't remember many other books I read or papers I wrote. Nothing stands out to me as "really fun" or "really interesting." I guess I remember reading The Great Gatsby for extra credit, and another book about jazz where the main character travels back in time to listen to and play with some of the greats, like Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey.

4.) I remember writing was fun for me in my first college composition class. The instructor had us write 7 essays that quarter, basically 1 every 1.5 weeks. But the topics were fun and often had to do with essays we read and talked about. We were to get our inspirations from the essays we read and talked about, or we were to write about the same thing we read about, or we had to write on the same topic, or we had to "imitate" an essay we read. My second college composition class was nowhere as much fun.

5.) I remember when I really felt like I was learning to write in an academic or scholarly way, and it was during my senior year of college. The course was a required course for English majors, "Literary Research and Writing," English 275. I was taking this sophomore-level course during my senior year, two years late, basically, but I hadn't fit it in until then. The teacher was a stickler for detail and precision and correctness and somehow really motivated me to see my writing in a different way. I finally felt like my writing was improving. She gave good feedback during our individual conferences, and she let us write about what we wanted, although we had to write the kinds of papers she assigned.

 

Fourth: From my brainstorming, I then try to find "a thread to tie it all together." And this "thread" becomes the main idea or thesis statement which brings it all together, makes it relate to each other and all fit in the same paper, with nothing tangential or extraneous.

From the examples I have generated above -- I left some other, non-related stuff out -- I'm seeing a common thread of literacy being fun for me, times when I was excited about literacy, times when I felt I was being changed by reading and writing.

So my main idea might be expressed something like this:

ROUGH DRAFT:

 

Questions?