1.2 - Introduction to Literacy

What comes to mind when you hear the term “literacy“? Traditionally, we can define literacy as the ability to read and write. To be literate is to be a reader and writer. More broadly, this term has come to be used in other fields and specialties and refers generally to an ability or competency.

Or, you may be a casual football fan, but to be football literate, you would need to be able to understand and read the playbook, have an understanding of the positions, define terms like “offsides” or “holding” as they relate to the sport, and interpret the hand signals used by the referees.

Educator and writer Shaelynn Faarnsworth describes and defines literacy as “social” and “constantly changing.” In this unit, we’ll explore literacy as a changing, dynamic process. By expanding our definition of literacy, we’ll come to a better understanding of our skills as readers and writers. We’ll use this discussion so that you, as writers, can better understand and write about “…what skills [you] get and what [you] don’t, [and include your] interests, passions, and quite possibly YouTube.”

There are two important ways we’ll think about reading in this course. Close reading and critical reading are both important processes with difference focuses. Close reading is a process to understand what is being said. It’s often used in summaries, where the goal is to comprehend and report on what a text is communicating. Compared to critical reading, an analytical process focused on how and why an idea is presented, close reading forces us to slow down and identify the meaning of the information. This skill is especially important in summaries and accurately quoting and paraphrasing.

Pay Attention to the Story

A literacy narrative is a story about how reading, writing, or communicating has shaped your life. It could be about learning a new language, discovering a love of reading, figuring out how to write in school, or finding ways to express yourself in your community. These stories aren’t just about the mechanics of reading or writing; they’re about how words and communication influence who we are and how we interact with the world.

When you analyze a literacy narrative, you’re doing more than noticing what happened. You’re paying attention to how the story is told, why it matters, and how it reflects both personal experiences and larger cultural or social ideas. Think about the experiences the writer chooses to highlight. Who influenced them along the way? What challenges or turning points shaped their learning? Small details, like a favorite teacher, a family member who read to them, or a particular classroom experience, can tell you a lot about how literacy has impacted their growth.

Look for Themes and Patterns

As you read, you might begin to notice recurring ideas or themes. Maybe the story shows how learning from mistakes can help someone gain confidence, or how writing can become a way to find one’s voice. Perhaps it reflects the challenges of navigating different languages or cultures. These patterns reveal the deeper significance of the story beyond just the events it describes.

Consider Context, Structure, and Style

Context is also important. Every literacy narrative exists within a personal, cultural, and sometimes historical context. A writer’s family, community, or school environment shapes how they encounter language. Broader social pressures or cultural expectations can influence their experiences as well. Thinking about context helps you understand why the story matters and how it connects to larger ideas about literacy and learning.

The way a story is told—the structure, tone, and style—also shapes its meaning. Some narratives move chronologically, starting from early experiences and moving forward in time. Others may jump between events or focus on reflections that tie the story together. A writer’s voice can be formal, humorous, conversational, or reflective, and the choice of details and examples can make the story vivid and engaging. Paying attention to these elements shows you how the craft of writing communicates meaning as much as the content itself.

Reflect on Your Own Connections

As you analyze others’ literacy narratives, it’s helpful to think about your own experiences. How do these stories resonate with your own journey with reading, writing, and communicating? How are your challenges and successes similar or different? What can you learn about yourself as a writer by seeing how someone else tells their story?

Engaging with literacy narratives in this way teaches you not only to read critically but also to understand your own writing and growth more deeply. When you analyze a story, you’re learning to notice the choices writers make, the influences that shape their experiences, and the ways that words can reflect identity, culture, and personal growth. Ultimately, this practice gives you tools to tell your own story with confidence and clarity, while gaining insight into the many ways literacy shapes lives.

You may have heard of “rhetorical questions” or gotten frustrated watching the news when a commentator dismisses another by saying “that’s just empty rhetoric” — but what does rhetoric mean? 

With definitions dating back to Aristotle and Plato, this is a complex concept with many historical and contemporary definitions. We define rhetoric as the ways language and other communication strategies are used to achieve a purpose with an audience. Below, we’ll explore the rhetorical situation, examining how many different factors contribute to how a writer can achieve their goals, and what may influence them to make different decisions.

Audience: The Intended Readers or Viewers

There are many ways to identify this group — you may describe characteristics of the group, like their nationality, gender, age, or other relevant factors. It may help to think of the audience as an identity group: for example, you probably identify as a student, and that means you have something in common with other readers of this text: you are interested in learning, you are educated, and you speak English. You may have different backgrounds and experiences, but there are some qualities we can assume a student possesses. Your role and experience with this text as a student is different than the role of instructors who are using this book for their course, and instructors similarly share some qualities while others differ. This process does force you to make some assumptions, but taking steps to define and describe the readers of a text helps understand who they are, what’s important to them, and how they’ll interpret a text.

• • • Ask yourself: Who is likely to, or supposed to, see this?

Text: The Artifact

This paragraph is a type of text, which is a little different than this entire book as a text. More broadly, we can think about texts as whatever is being consumed: the billboard on your drive home, the trailer you watch before the actual movie, the clothes you’re wearing, and the birthday card you’re sending could all be interpreted as different types of texts, each with a different author, intended for different audiences. Often in academic contexts, we’ll use the term text and genre interchangeably because they both refer to the category type of what is being read or consumed. For example, novels are categorized by genre, such as science fiction or romance. There are many academic genres that we’ll review, such as editorials, book reviews, peer-reviewed journals, and more.

• • Ask yourself: What am I looking at?

Purpose: The Goal

Whatever the text, every genre or author has a goal in mind. This can be more simply reduced to a strong verb that describes the goal: to persuade, to refute, to argue, to defend, to sell, etc. Some genres have easily identifiable purposes. That billboard is clearly trying to sell the product, while the movie trailer is trying to entertain or to sell tickets. While texts may have several goals, we’ll try to identify the primary, most appropriate, goal to help focus our close and critical reading of the text. In this book, our goal is to educate you by introducing all these new concepts so you can apply these strategies in your writing.

• • Ask yourself: Why was the text created?

Context: The Situation Around the Text

Context is compiled from a lot of different factors. When reading, you may have been told to guess the meaning of a word based on context clues and this definition is similar. Consider the situation around the text and what influenced the creation of the text, and how it may influence the other components. For example, reading a text about rhetoric from 400 BCE would be very different than one written 100 years ago, and this one you’re reading now is also different. Or, 1,000 words may seem like a lot, and it would make for a very long poem or text message, but the average novel is at least 50,000 words and hundreds of pages. All of these different factors fall into the context that shapes what is created. The writing you’ll do in this course is shaped differently than what you might accomplish for your history or psychology courses because the context changes for each course and assignment.

• • Ask yourself: When was this created? How did it get developed? Where was the text published? What shaped the creative process?

Each of these categories intersects and influences the other. When we think about a complete rhetorical situation, you’ll need to define all these different pieces to best understand the text. As we begin practicing close reading, drawing the rhetorical situation will be a helpful tool.

This chapter contains materials from:

• First-Year Composition by Leslie Davis and Kiley Miller,  Colorado State University, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.