Andrew Terry

Literacy Vignette Reflection

This assignment, in my eyes, was somewhat of an enlightening
experience for me. I feel like I learned a little about myself and about
writing that I didnt think I would learn. There were many emotions
going into this paper that almost blended together while planning and
writing. There was confusion all the way to actual happiness to learn
something about myself. I will talk about what my feelings about the
things I learned going thought this paper, along with some difficulties
that I faced. After that I will include how my process to writing this
looked like, as well as how the content connects the main idea that is
trying to be conveyed in class.
During the planning and actual creation of this paper, I noticed a
few things that seemed to jump out at me. Considering this paper was
just primarily about me, I felt like I struggled more than I expected too.
I believe that the source of my struggle was, basically, fully
understanding the meaning of literacy in the context of a non-school
related topic. My understanding of literacy for a very long time was
just relating to reading and writing, not about things such as
development in life. After my confusion over the main topic, it did
become interesting, mostly from what I found out about myself.
Writing this paper was a way to find out the origins of, well, me. I now

know what my entire way of being is based/started from. I can now

say I have an understanding of why I am the way I am, my identity.
The challenge I faced with this paper had to be just the overall
definition of literacy as stated earlier. However, once I got a grasp of
the meaning of literacy, my perception of literacy changed. I always
thought that it was just how a person interprets a reading, or how
someone writes a book or paper. I now know that is more than what is
on the paper. It is how reading and writing forms a persons opinion
and ideas that will be later applied to real life situations. Literacy now
means so much more to me than just words on paper.
Now not knowing the topic fully in the beginning of writing
altered my initial plan of the writing process. I normally go in to a
paper that is about a topic I know so much about, myself, and begin
typing, seeing what comes up. Research is where I started, which
partially was done by discussions in class about what literacy was.
Following this, I began to brainstorm and wrote topics down in a word
document that I wanted to hit on. I dont normally do that but due to
the nature of the topic I thought it would be beneficial. So I planned
out what I was going to talk about and how I would sync everything
together to make it flow. After that it just fit together like a puzzle.
On another note, I tried to keep that connection to the class
discussions in my paper as I wrote it. Just saying how literacy meant
more than just reading and writing. Although I didnt want to ruin the

flow of the paper by doing this, so I kept it subtle. I feel that I did a
good job of showing that I understood the topic in my writing. This
paper was a surprisingly enjoyable and enlightening experience even
through the difficulties.