My development as both a reader and writer throughout the course of semester has been tremendous. My ability to both analyze the ideas presented in literature and to develop my own ideas and opinions regarding literature is much better than it was when the course first began.
For my significant writing project the source that I relied heaviest on was Alexander’s ‘Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: ‘Master’ and ‘Little’ Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre,” College Composition and Communication”. I worked with Alexander’s writing the most because I saw the most potential to both agree with and expand on the ideas that Alexander presented in her writing. As I wrote this paper I tried to think of the “quotation sandwich” technique that we discussed in class to properly introduce and explain quotes that I used in my paper. One of places that I felt my best example of using, integrating and explaining a quotation from Alexander’s writing was when I was discussing the idea of being a child prodigy and how it is expected to lead to success later in life. “Tyler used his literacy excellence to continue his academic success all the way through his high school career, and hopefully beyond school into his life experiences; for Tyler literacy does equal success in the future. This idea is discussed by Alexander in her paper on different types of literacy narratives. She explains how this idea of child prodigy literacy equalling academic success later in life is perpetuated by the authors of literacy narratives. “The child prodigy narrative, the fourth most common cultural narrative, promotes the idea that unless children are exposed to (middle class) school literacy and learn these values at an early age, they will not be academically successful.” (Alexander, 619) Tyler is one of the many students that displayed a child prodigy narrative in his literacy narrative, his ideas regarding his literacy as a child align directly with what Alexander discussed regarding child prodigy narratives.” I believe that I after introducing the quote I properly integrated it into my own writing and then explained the relevance of the quote to the actual paper. I think that this example shows how much I have developed as a writer since the beginning of the term, this is a much stronger use of a quote with proper integration and explanation than you would be able to find in some of my earlier papers.
