Written Language & Literacy Narrative Cover Letter

For Phase 1 of ENG 110, one of the biggest takeaways was really learning to explore and analyze different genres and rhetorical situations. Learning to annotate was a key point in this Phase because I really did not care to read things that I couldn’t relate to, especially articles. To be honest, I’ve even taken my annotation lessons and applied them to my other classes. Annotating keeps me engaged in the text by highlighting what I think is the main idea of what I’m reading and circling big confusing words to come back to in order to get a better understanding of what I’m reading. One of my favorite moments in this class was learning to analyze speech texts. I loved watching different videos of spoken word poetries and seeing artists convey their emotions through their words. Those very acts are what inspired me to do a poem on my experience with Patois. It taught me to take pride in my language and my communication style.

Learning about exigence impacted my writing practices the most because it’s given me reason to get back into poetry. I avoided writing poetry for years because I thought it made me depressed because I used to write poems about my inner feelings of pain and insecurities, never realizing my emotions were actually my exigence in my writing. Poetry was my way of getting those emotional situations out of my mind and body and onto paper, my own cathartic method of release. I guess I could say that purpose ties into it as well because I love to express myself and that’s something that’s hard for most, at least verbally. Being able to release my feelings through literature and influence those who read it is inspiring for me. It’s one of the reasons I volunteered to go first because I used to be a really shy kid. I didn’t like presenting in front of class and I used to think people could sense my nervousness. But almost everyone in my class was pretty nervous to present so I wanted to just be that bridge to confidence. To show others that it doesn’t matter what you say but how you say it. That if you just convey your emotions in your literature, you’re bound to connect with at least one person in your audience because we all feel things in the end. We may not know how to express them, but we know for sure that we feel them.

One of the most meaningful insights that I’ve gained was realizing that I’m not alone in my experiences. When dealing with feelings of insecurity you tend to think others can’t relate and they have it altogether. But during presentations, hearing my classmate’s different backgrounds and experiences with language I couldn’t help but feel some type of commonality that we are actually in this together; that we all come from families that can pressure us to succeed and that we all feel like outcasts at some point in our lives. I loved doing peer reviews and sharing my works and getting good feedback. I loved that I was able to help at least one of my classmates move in the right direction with their narrative. It’s really just a good feeling for me to be in support of others.

I didn’t really have a specific audience when it came to my narrative. I mean if I had to choose one, I could say it was whoever was willing to listen. The purpose of my narrative was really just to share my experience of learning Patois. My language was honestly tailored around my confusion on what “dialect” was. I just recently learned this term after enrolling in class and I didn’t really like the meaning of it because it spoke of English as being separated by cultures, or races when I’ve only ever known English to be one language. I know it sounds different from culture to culture, but I’ve never really saw any English “dialect” as a “minority form or lesser” so I made sure to express those very sentiments in my narrative letting it be known how dialect confuses me.