Chris McDevitt
11/2/18
English 110J
Paper 3 Barclays Paragraphs
In literacy narratives, the most commonly used type of narrative is the success narrative. A success narrative is a narrative in which the author has to go through something tough, but when they do, it is a great success. Alexander says that in the grand scheme of student literacy narratives, success narratives are the most widely written. She then exclaims, “The most common “cultural narrative” that scholars observe students performing in literacy narratives is the conventional literacy success story, a narrative that assumes the more literate one is, the more successful he and she will be.(609)” This shows that most students enjoy writing about a literacy moment of joy rather than of disappointment or sadness. A good example of a success narrative is the literacy narrative written by Chelsey Haughey. Chelsey wrote a narrative about how a program called Title One at her school changed her life. She explains that she was falling behind in her first grade class because she didn’t know how to spell words, and thus she needed to be put into the Title One class to get the help she needed. She said of Title One that, “That class really did change my life. I owe my achievements to my Title One teachers Mrs.Kanakis, Ms.Story, and my parents who never gave up on me despite how frustrating it got at times.” She strongly suggests that it would have been beneficial for many struggling young writers to get into a program like that at a young age. She says that it changed her life, which means that it is incredibly important to her.
Literacy narratives appear to have a good many patterns running through them at all times. Whether it is schematic, thematic, or structural, it seems that reading literacy narratives from different people can sometimes sound very very similar. First off, the crowdsourcing spreadsheet shows off many different patterns. The two most prevalent patterns is that the vast majority of victim narratives have to do with school, and most of them happen during middle or high school. I have noticed this by observing which other narratives people describe as victim and then looking at when and where these victim narratives took place. In the victim narrative by Meghan Mazzochi, she is a high school student and her story is a victim narrative. She says in her paper, “He gave me so much advice on how to “fix it” that the essay started to sound more like him then it did me. It was the first time that I felt like I couldn’t speak up in my writing.” Now this quote is extremely relevant because it is common of a lot of the victim narratives that we’ve read to have a story similar to Meghan’s. Many high school students go through a period where they fall out of love with writing because of the restraints that high school teachers put on the content that students write. Another literacy narrative that falls into the exact same category as Meghan’s is by a man who just goes by Troy. Troy’s literacy narrative talked about how he’d struggled a little as a freshman, but that things were about to get a lot worse during his sophomore year. When he talks of sophomore year, he brings up that “ The highest grade I received on an essay for him was a low “B”. I consistently struggled in that class no matter how hard I tried.” This is him saying how much of a struggle it was to keep up with the course during his 10th grade year.
