Narratives and Writing Ideas

The reading for today had to do with Literacy Narratives and Generating Ideas and Texts. I first read the Literacy Narratives which consisted of five stories. These stories were told from authors and each shared about their lives or a certain problem in which they ran into. The first story is about Tanya, a Latina who can not fluently speak Spanish, who struggles to learn the language in which her family speaks. The second is about Frederick Douglass and his struggle of learning to read. The third, a story told from Malcolm X, tells of the education he received while in prison. It tells of how he spent his time reading and doing other things to improve is penmanship. In the fourth story, written by Amy Tan, tells of a daughter and her mother. The girl, a writer who loves language, is confronted with the problems of her mother having poor English. The story tells of times her mother's lack of English came between them. The last story is by Mike Rose. In the story he looks back on old times and talks of memories he has.

The chapter on Generating Ideas and Text discussed different ways to start off a good writing. Some of the ways were free writing, looping, listing, and clustering. I personally like listing just because it is the way I have always done it and it works effectively for me. After reading these ideas I feel that I have a better sense of how a narrative should be. I also feel that I will be able to use things that I read to make my own narrative the best it can be!