Cerrito 1 Tyler Cerrito Mrs.

Raymond ENGL 1103 19 September 2013 Layers of Literacy On the outer layer of my literacy story I seem to have nothing that is defining at all about how I came to read or how I continued to develop that ability. I did not learn to read from a dictionary while living in a jail cell (Haley). I went to a school and learned in a classroom from a teacher trained to instill the ability to read in children that were my age. As layers are pulled back and examined, my story has its own defining characteristics which make it my own personal story. I was privileged during some of my elementary school to be able to attend a private school with a ridiculously high cost, mediocre teachers, and few students. During my first grade year I had a wonderful teacher who would bring my class to the library, which was five minutes away, every week. We would be told to pick out one book a week and read it before the next week. At first this was the green flag for me to go find a good picture book of airplanes or cars, but as time went on my teacher challenged me to get a chapter book. I started reading my big boy chapter books and really fell in love with a series called Animorphs. I read all the ones that they had at the library, and then one day my parents asked if they could read my beloved series. Afterwards much to my dismay, my parents said I was not allowed to get these books from the library anymore because they were bad for me. This killed my want to read for the rest of my first grade year.

Cerrito 2 Not long before my second grade year I found the Harry Potter series and began to read the books day and night. I still read the same Harry Potter books today, because I developed a metaphorical bond with my emblematic friends, Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Whenever none of my real friends could hang out with me I would go play with my literary friends. This series made me develop early as a reader, considering I was 6 when I began reading Harry Potter. My parents initially thought that I wasnt actually reading them until they asked me what the books were about and could give the details from every scene. Obviously I was very into these books at that young age and was very intrigued by reading until I got to middle school. There I started to receive lots of reading for school in the form of homework. I did not enjoy this type of reading because they wanted me to read too fast and not at my own pace. When I read I will read five pages one day and a hundred the next. I am naturally an inconsistent reader and the assignments from school went against my normal pace to all but end my desire to read. Also in my middle school and high school time I was challenged to see a second meaning in literature beyond the literal. I could not see it. Even after the teacher would explain it to me many times I could not comprehend what the poem or story was trying to say beyond that there were long white hills (Hemingway). I always saw the hills but never the elephants. This further made me push away from reading. As a result, I would not read assignments because I would not understand them anyways; I gave up on reading. This all changed over several weeks. My family attended a church called Corinth every week for as long as I remember, and after several events my parents decided that we needed to leave that church. We arrived at Harvest and attended there during my final two years of high school. My parents inadvertently taught me that there are two ways of interpreting things. I

Cerrito 3 saw that Corinth was doing some things incorrectly according to the bible, and Harvest was doing those things correctly. I learned that I needed to listen to everything and think about what if this isnt true or what are they trying to say? This changed my way of interpreting everything I heard and read. This directly influenced my decision during my senior year to challenge myself and take AP Literature to further develop my newfound abilities, and I did pretty well. I learned new things and my eyes opened to a confusing world of literature. I understood and could comprehend most of what I read and this assisted me in developing my own beliefs and how to express them. Because of this I feel that I became a better reader and writer last year. One thing that slowed down my literary progress last year and in years previous was technology in the form of texting. Even while writing this paper I saturate my mind with the grammarless, abbreviated art of the text message. Texting has deprecated my grammar, punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary. It makes all of these obsolete and all but laughable to use while sending a message. Texting has taught me habits that I have to be very careful not to use when writing anything besides a text message. I find myself abbreviating or spelling things wrong all the time because Im so used to doing that through texting. It has become a distraction from good grammar and it is painfully obvious in the depreciation of literacy today. 171.3 billion text messages are sent every month in the United States, and I know I account for about four to five thousand of these(CTIA). Another way to look at this is to think that nearly five thousand times a month I am creating some bad habits. And people all over the United States are doing the exact same thing. They are creating poor habits that are corrupting their ability to communicate with their writing in a correct fashion.

Cerrito 4 Whether a layer of my literacy is pure, crisp and good, or rotten, brittle and nasty, it is a layer of my literacy narrative. The rotten layers are nasty but they require the pure layers to build up other pure layers to compensate for the bad. These are all parts of what has made me the literate person I am today. They have shaped me to read, write, and believe the things I do. They have made me who I was meant to be, and for that I am thankful.

Cerrito 5 Works Cited CTIA. "U.S. Wireless Quick Facts." U.S. Wireless Quick Facts. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Sept. 2013. Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. By Malcolm Little. N.p.: Grove, 1965. N.Print. Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants." Transition Aug. 1927: n. pag. Web.