My Literacy Narrative

I will preface this literacy narrative by a warning: this is not, in any way, an essay about my positive academic experiences with reading and writing. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE reading, but this fondness was not rooted in me because of school. Writing, on the other hand, has been the bane of my scholastic journey since the start of my high school years. This could explain why I waited until my very last quarter at university to take my required writing class.

My strong aversion to writing started in high school in my home country Monaco, I despised the process because I didn’t have the freedom to chose the topic I was going to write about whether it be in Philosophy, French Literature, English, Italian.. I was always told the negatives

Sadly I was presented with the same situation as on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. Yes, the professors were significantly kinder and much more helpful; they had office hours and actually pointed out components of my writings that they thought were adequate. However, the three paragraph long essay prompts with very specific requirements and expectations were the same as in high school. Lacking regular writing practice because the vast majority of my classes were scientific, any class that I took with a writing component destroyed my moral. I took Endocrinology, Organic Chemistry, Physics and received near perfect scores consistently, surely I could tackle the most basic Sociology and Comparative Literature classes. However, this was not the case, the few classes with a writing component I was required to endure were the ones that made me call my mother at two in the morning in tears. This did not occur because these classes were particularly difficult. I was just upset that once again, as in high school, I was not given any freedom to write about what I enjoyed. Once again, I memorized connections made in lectures, adapted them to the required format, submitted multiple drafts to my professors until they told me exactly what I needed to do to get an A. The

On the other hand, in university, I was required to read, a lot, in a variety of courses. However, I was never told the benefits of reading, how much of an impact it had on the way I wrote, viewed the world, analyzed and critic. Reading is simply something one must do. If you enjoy it, great, it’ll be an easy task for you. If you do not, you still have to do it, it is not at a higher academic level that professors take the time to change the students from “non-readers to readers”. I believe that a shift from viewing reading as a task to a pleasure has a very slim chance of happening both in high school and university. Most of the people I am surrounded by are trying to have a 4.0 GPA while taking very challenging classes, applying for veterinary, dental and medical schools, working in laboratories, volunteering and trying to get a perfect score on the MCAT or GRE. There is no time for these individuals to take pleasure in reading and view it as a learning experience. Once their academic career has ended around age thirty, these new pediatricians, orthodontists, veterinarians have had their faces in books for decades. Predictably, most don’t want to read anything anymore. Those who do were the same people who at age ten would read in secret with a flashlight at one in the morning. This is