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    Literacy History Coffin Week 3

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    Daniel Alan
    This document provides a literacy history of the author from childhood through adulthood. As a child, the author was an avid reader and storyteller, even if some of his stories were exaggerated lies. In middle school, he started writing stories and roleplaying games to gain attention and fit in. This experience taught him the importance of crafting stories for his audience. In college, a writing class encouraged the author to take writing more seriously and view it as a craft. After dropping out of college, the author did not write for many years until recently starting again to explore his thoughts and make sense of his life experiences.

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    Literacy History Coffin Week 3

    Uploaded by

    Daniel Alan
    29 views5 pages
    This document provides a literacy history of the author from childhood through adulthood. As a child, the author was an avid reader and storyteller, even if some of his stories were exaggerated lies. In middle school, he started writing stories and roleplaying games to gain attention and fit in. This experience taught him the importance of crafting stories for his audience. In college, a writing class encouraged the author to take writing more seriously and view it as a craft. After dropping out of college, the author did not write for many years until recently starting again to explore his thoughts and make sense of his life experiences.

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    writing instruction

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    This document provides a literacy history of the author from childhood through adulthood. As a child, the author was an avid reader and storyteller, even if some of his stories were exaggerated lies. In middle school, he started writing stories and roleplaying games to gain attention and fit in. This experience taught him the importance of crafting stories for his audience. In college, a writing class encouraged the author to take writing more seriously and view it as a craft. After dropping out of college, the author did not write for many years until recently starting again to explore his thoughts and make sense of his life experiences.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    29 views5 pages

    Literacy History Coffin Week 3

    Uploaded by

    Daniel Alan
    This document provides a literacy history of the author from childhood through adulthood. As a child, the author was an avid reader and storyteller, even if some of his stories were exaggerated lies. In middle school, he started writing stories and roleplaying games to gain attention and fit in. This experience taught him the importance of crafting stories for his audience. In college, a writing class encouraged the author to take writing more seriously and view it as a craft. After dropping out of college, the author did not write for many years until recently starting again to explore his thoughts and make sense of his life experiences.

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    Running Head: LITERACY HISTORY ESSAY

    Literacy History Essay


    Daniel Coffin
    Concordia University, Nebraska

    Submitted in partial fulfillment of


    the requirements for EDUC 622
    November 11th, 2015

    WRITING INSTRUCTION: LITERACY HISTORY


    2
    From a young age, I have loved to read, I have been fascinated by words, and I
    have been a pathological liar. It was inevitable that writing would come to take an
    important place in my life. From middle school, through college, and into my
    professional life as a teacher, my history as a writer has taken a few interesting turns,
    but the through line remains the same: writing has been for me a means of selfactualization, a creative act in defiance of powerlessness, a way to reach out to people
    around me for attention.
    I wasnt kidding about being a liar. Im not proud of it, but I look back on my
    preadolescent behavior with a bemused detachment. I lied as easily as some breathed.
    I was caught in my lies more than once, but I got away with it more often than that. In
    my defense, I lied not to seek unfair gain, but to entertain. What was the harm in
    embellishing a story if it amused the audience? Bit by bit, I learned not to strain the
    limits of credulity. Why did I ever think that my second grade teacher would believe my
    dad and I found dinosaur bones in my backyard? In this informal storytelling laboratory, I
    learned the value of making my tales believable. I learned just how far I could stretch
    the circumstances I was recounting so they would be powerful without being
    preposterous.
    I had a really awkward adolescence. I didnt feel like I fit in anywhere. By the time
    I hit middle school, I realized that I had to cultivate some means of appealing to people
    around me. I wasnt athletic, I wasnt attractive, my parents werent wealthy, and while I
    wasnt a dolt, neither was I particularly bright. What would be my angle? It was around
    this time I discovered Dungeons & Dragons, which I would play with my friends. For a
    lonely kid craving excitement, adventure, and a social pastime, it was a revelation. My

    WRITING INSTRUCTION: LITERACY HISTORY


    3
    friends thought I was funny and creative. I began to take over the Dungeon Master
    responsibilities, and I would spend hours filling notebooks with strange places, fabulous
    treasures, terrible monsters, and wicked villains for my friends to explore through
    fantasy role-play. In those notebooks, I could create entire worlds out of words.
    My friends reacted to my creations so favorably, I started writing stories - the
    kinds of stories I wishes we could read in school but never did, full of daring heroes,
    fantastic locales, and epic adventure. It was around this time my parents bought a
    personal computer with a word-processing program, which I could use to type up and
    print my stories, which my friends would pass around. These copies would eventually
    make their way back to me with comments from my friends - this part worked, this part
    not so much. I learned from this experience to appeal to my audience. The friends of
    mine who read my stories knew what they liked - more scares, more gore, more humor and I knew that if I gave them what they wanted, they would keep reading, and I would
    get the positive attention I so desperately craved. This attention to audience would
    serve me well as a writer later in life.
    By the time I reached college, I had quit writing stories. It was a goof, a game,
    not something to take seriously. I had the skill to write passably well, but I didnt really
    have anything worth saying, and so I let it go. As part of my major, I was required to take
    a writing course, and the only one that fit my schedule was creative nonfiction. We read
    The Color of Water and Angelas Ashes and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake
    Streamline Baby and started drafting some of our own work, talking about our own lives.
    I was surprised to find that even with my relatively sheltered life, I might have had
    something worth writing about. My second surprise of the class came when I got my

    WRITING INSTRUCTION: LITERACY HISTORY


    4
    second piece of graded work back from our instructor who told me succinctly, Youre
    talented, but youre lazy. Writing doesnt just happen. You have to work at this if you
    want to create something worth reading. I had never had an instructor be so blunt with
    me, but the criticism was well-deserved. I had become complacent and self-satisfied,
    and I was not serious about the craft of writing. Mr. Allen showed me that I could be a
    writer if I chose, but that choice would entail real discipline and work in order to perfect
    the craft.
    It was not to be. Money problems and a general lack of direction in life led me to
    drop out of school not long after, and my conflicting feelings about school and writing led
    me to put down my pen for the better part of a decade. I eventually went back to school,
    finished my degree, got my teaching certificate, and settled into the life of a middle
    school English teacher, which kept me busy enough with lesson planning and paper
    grading that I had little time for pleasure reading or writing.
    It was earlier this year that my colleague and I started our students writing daily
    in writers notebooks as part of our writing curriculum. To model what I wanted them to
    do, I sat down at my desk for our fifteen-minute freewrite and started writing in my
    notebook. To my surprise, I wrote without stopping until my timer went off. It felt great. I
    had a few hundred words on the paper that I didnt realize I had in me. I took my
    notebook home that night and continued filling out that piece into three or four page
    narrative. The next week, I wrote a short story in a lull between classes, after the baby
    had been fed her last bottle and put to bed, but before I was tired enough to go to sleep.
    I posted it in Facebook because I was proud of it, and I received a fairly positive

    WRITING INSTRUCTION: LITERACY HISTORY


    5
    response from friends. It was the first piece of creative writing I had done in over a
    decade.
    It was only then that I realized why I should have been writing - to explore my
    thoughts, to figure out how I felt about events in my life, to make sense of my new role
    as a father. I didnt need to be a famous published author. Even though I would never
    publish, there was still value in putting pencil to paper to gather and shape my thoughts.
    As I grow older and (hopefully) wiser, I look forward to sharing my experiences
    with writing with my students and my daughter, so that they can come to find the
    practice of writing as entertaining, empowering, and enlightening as I have. If nothing
    else, maybe someday I can sit down to a game of Dungeons & Dragons with my
    daughter and be dazzled by the world she has conjured up from her imagination.

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