1.3 - Preparing a Draft

A literacy narrative is a common genre for writers who want to explore their own experiences with writing. Just Google “literacy narrative” and find endless examples! While this assignment will respond to specific prompts and follow a more specific structure than some of the examples you’ll find on Google, there is a common theme in each essay that revolves around your relationship with literacy. Week one defined literacy,  but what about narrative? Narrative can be defined as a method of story-telling. In the simplest terms, your goal in this literacy narrative, in this assignment, is to tell the story of your personal experience with literacy, either from a past event, something you’re working with now, or looking to the future. 

Writing a literacy narrative isn’t just about checking boxes on an assignment sheet—it’s about reflecting on your own experiences with reading, writing, and communication. The prompts from the assignment sheet are designed to help you focus your story. Each one asks you to connect your personal experiences with the bigger idea of literacy: how you’ve been challenged, how you currently interact with texts, and how you might engage with them in the future. Think of these prompts as different “doors” into your story; you only need to choose one, but whichever you select will give you space to explore what literacy has meant in your life.

1. Describe a situation when you were challenged in your reading by describing the source of that challenge (vocabulary, length, organization, something else). How did you overcome that challenge to understand what the text was saying? What strategies or steps do you plan to take in the future to make the process easier?

2. Describe the type of texts you read (watch, listen to, etc.) most often. What makes them easy or challenging to read and interpret? What strategies do you use to ensure that you fully understand them or can apply them?

3. Describe what kind of texts you think you will have to read or interpret in the future and where you will encounter these texts (i.e. future classes, your career, etc.). How do you think they might challenge you? What strategies will you use to overcome these difficulties?

Each of these prompts gives you the chance to tell your story and examine your experience with a specific type of literacy. As you consider the prompts, think about how you could tell a story to answer these questions. With this frame of mind, complete the following activity.

Each prompt from the assignment sheet includes three questions, which we’ll use as the starting point for three paragraphs. In each set of prompts, your first paragraph will describe the text; remember, when thinking about reading a text, we can interpret this broadly, like with music and sports. The second paragraph will explore the challenges or successes you’ve experienced. Then, the third paragraph will focus on strategies and techniques for improvement. This way, you can tell a more complete story of your experience, sharing the details and emotions along the way and making readers feel like they’re right there with you. But how do you capture all this detail in a way that helps you organize your thoughts and keep your reader interested in the story?

The P.I.E. Method

We’ll use a formula for the paragraph structure called PIE, which stands for Point, Information, and Explanation. This method will help you plan what you want to say, and then give examples so you can show why each step was so important to you. Let’s review each part of the paragraph, and then we’ll look at how this applies to your literacy narrative with a student sample.

• Point: To start, every paragraph needs a Point, a main idea and the reason you’re writing. The goal of this first line is to summarize what you’re going to tell your readers.  You can usually present this idea in a single sentence. Introduce the main idea of the paragraph.

  • In the literacy narrative: Since each paragraph responds to a question from the prompt, the Point of each paragraph should tell readers which question you’re answering. By rephrasing the question in your Point, you can signal to your classmates and instructor so that they know which question you’re answering.

• Information: Every paragraph needs evidence or specific examples. These are the details that you can report. You may have several examples in mind, and you may need to offer names, quotes, or paraphrases of what you said or read. This could take multiple sentences to describe but should rely on the facts that you can name, NOT your reaction or analysis.

  • In the literacy narrative: Most of your evidence, in a narrative, will be from your experience. Report what happened, what you read, or what you learned. Naming these details can help your readers see through your eyes when you give specific examples.

• Explanation: This is how you make your examples come to life! In the Information, you reported on the what, and now it’s your chance to describe the why  and how. This is the most important, and therefore the longest, part of the paragraph where you make sense of the Information and tell your readers what it all means to you. The explanation includes analysis that builds on the evidence provided.

  • In the literacy narrative: Help your readers get inside your head and feel like they’re with you. Keeping the Point in mind and showing how all these ideas relate will bring the paragraph together by developing each example clearly and offering a thoughtful response to each prompt. How did you feel about the examples from the Information? Why was it was so significant? Why should your readers care about this experience? Answering these questions will help show your readers what you experienced so they can understand the significance and connect with you.

Together, these pieces all come together to create a strong, developed paragraph that responds to the question from the prompt more fully.

Beginning a literacy narrative can feel a little like standing at the edge of a story you know well but don’t quite know how to tell yet. You already carry the memories, the challenges, the routines, and even the hopes that shape your reading and writing life—this assignment simply asks you to choose one thread and follow where it leads. As you prepare to draft, it helps to think first about how you want to frame the experience you’ll be exploring. Every literacy narrative has a sense of time running through it, whether it looks backward at a moment that changed you, pauses to examine your current habits, or looks ahead toward the kinds of texts you expect to encounter in the future.

The prompts on the assignment sheet invite you to make that choice: you might revisit a moment when reading was difficult and consider what made it challenging, or you might take a closer look at the kinds of texts you most often read—or watch, or listen to—right now and explore what they reveal about your everyday literacies. You might even imagine the kinds of texts waiting for you in your future academic or professional life, and reflect on the strategies you’ll need to interpret them. Each of these possibilities offers a different vantage point, a different way of understanding how literacy fits into your life.

Once you know the direction your narrative will take, an opening paragraph begins to form. Strong narratives often open by settling the reader into a particular moment or place—sometimes a classroom, sometimes a living room, sometimes a job site or even a future you’re only beginning to picture. From there, the focus sharpens: a single challenge, curiosity, realization, or shift in understanding becomes the center of gravity around which the rest of the story turns. Your first paragraph doesn’t need to spell out everything that will happen, but it usually hints at why this experience mattered and how it connects to your bigger understanding of literacy.

From that beginning, the narrative tends to grow naturally. Each paragraph deepens the story, offering another angle, another memory, another piece of insight that helps readers see how your relationship with texts has developed. Some writers linger on a particular memory and unpack it slowly; others move between moments to show a pattern taking shape. Whatever shape your narrative takes, your goal is to bring readers along with you—to help them see what you saw, feel what you felt, and understand what the experience revealed about the way you read or interpret the world.

This kind of writing isn’t about perfection in the first draft. It’s about discovery—about following the story until you find the insight at its center. As you plan and draft, think of your narrative as a conversation between your past, present, and future selves, each offering a piece of what literacy has meant to you and what it might mean going forward. The more clearly you can show that journey, the stronger your narrative will be.

This chapter contains material from:

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