The Literacy Narrative was my first of three big papers due in the class. Going into it, I was quite anxious because I didn’t know how harshly my professor graded. We did have some smaller assignments due here and there but it just felt different for me. You didn’t see those other assignments counting as much as 10% on your grade like this did. This wasn’t a paper that I could write up in 20 minutes. Ten percent was a lot in my eyes. That makes the difference between an A and a B, or a D or an F. So to make sure I got the first of the two, I made sure I put time into drafting, thinking and writing my essay and use all the time you allocated towards the essay properly.

The beginning was good for me. My professor was going over drafting styles and one of the ones he went over seemed to fit my style. It was called free writing. It was simply to just write and don’t stop. The purpose of that was to flush out all of the ideas out of your mind, then organize, delete and refine them later. This worked for me. It made sure that I got everything I wanted to say on paper, then I could look over it and see if it made sense to stay in the story or if I should just get rid of it.

While editing my writing and composing my first draft, I was satisfied with the result at the time. At that point, and even still, I feel as if I wrote a strong story, not necessarily a good paper though, which was the problem. I told the story truthfully and straight how I remember it, so just because anything wasn’t fabricated made it better in my eyes. I used anecdotes and details to my advantage to enhance the story and get my ideas across better. So until that point, all was well.

After getting my draft 1 grade back was when I felt upset. I don’t want to say my grade was unfair, because it was but I put the effort in and I just didn’t produce at the time. I received a B-, which wasn’t the beginning of a trend because that was my lowest grade of the semester, but I guess you could say it showed me I simply needed to do better.

In my essay, one of the main things I wrote about is that English classes were never my best, so going into it, I was expecting it to be a tough course that I didn’t like. I’m not saying it was easy, because I worked for the grades I got, but I definitely enjoyed it. I think writing how I didn’t like English classes in my paper, and writing how I always struggled in English classes made me want to do better. To try harder. After my first of three papers, I developed a liking for the class that I didn’t think I would, and I’m glad that it came to be that way.