My L1 Literacy Autobiography begins when I was born, I guess. My mom has shared with me that, from the time I was an infant, she talked to me constantly. And, she has specified, she spoke to me when I was young as if I were an adult. In other words, she did not speak "baby-ese" to me. The way she speaks to me now -- with the adult vocabulary and sentence structure -- is the same way she spoke to me when I was a small child.
As I grew, I was very interested in books. Obviously, language acquisition is a participation in a concert involving language reading, speaking, listening, and writing. I learned to read at an early age, was an avid talker, listened to my parents' conversations as well as those on TV programs. But I hated to write. Composing did not come as naturally to me as speaking and reading.
Writing in middle school seemed generic. My classmates and I learned sentence structure (back when diagramming was pedagogically popular), paragraph structure, and five-paragraph essays. It was in high school that purpose-specific strategies were shared with us. We practiced analysis writing by reading and responding to articles in Time and Newsweek. We composed essays and speeches as well as other genre-specific pieces (letters to the editor of our local newspaper).
As in the individuals portrayed in the case studies in Silva and Reichelt's article, I can pinpoint where and when my writing really began to "come into its own." In undergraduate courses at UIUC, I was shocked to realize that, really, I was poorly prepared to write for the situations required. I had written one research paper before I went to college. My analytical writing skills were quite undeveloped. As a psychology major -- and then as an education major studying to teach English in secondary schools -- I scrambled; I paid attention to every comment, every mark on every paper returned to me, and I set out to not make the same composition mistakes again.
While my analytical writing skills improved by leaps and bounds when I was an undergrad, it wasn't until I was in my third graduate school (here at ISU) that I finally began to learn (I feel as if I'm still learning!) how to write academically. For the most part, instructors' comments on my writing and synthesis of ideas and arguments have been helpful. However, I did encounter a time with a favorite instructor when, going over my seminar paper in a coffee shop, she scrawled on the front, "TAKE METAMUCIL BEFORE WRITING!" Apparently, I was trying so hard to sound academic that my writing was choppy, verbose, stilted, etc. My ideas and my argument were lost in a sea of verbosity. And so, since that moment, I have worked to achieve an academic style without sacrificing readability and coherence.
Silva and Reichelt's case studies touched on one more issue: writing for specific purposes. Last semester, in Dr. Robillard's Life-Writing course, we students were asked to compose two life-writing pieces. In preparation, we read other life-writing pieces (personal essays as well as longer works) as well as texts based on life-writing theory. I composed my piece. Then I changed my topic. Then life changed again, and so I felt I had something else to write about. In the end, I chose one topic, wrote a personal essay about it, revised it, and submitted it. I was quite pleased with it, as I had worked very diligently on it. When Dr. Robillard returned the essays, I eagerly sought her comments on the back page and what I expected was an A for a grade. I did not receive an A. Apparently, while I have learned to write for some purposes (academically, analytically, ...), I had not learned at that point to write a personal essay. Creative writing was totally new to me. After reading her comments, visiting her to chat about them, and then painstakingly composing the second, longer piece, I *think* I have figured out how to succeed in writing in that genre. But this experience showed me that writing skills in one mode do not necessarily point toward success in writing in other genres.
One final note I'd like to touch on: As I'm progressing through four semesters of learning Spanish, I've come to discover that the composing process in a second language can be excruciating. Currently, I am working through vocabulary and grammar exercises, hoping the composition exercise at the end of the unit will just magically disappear. Thus, I'm in awe of these L2 learners who have or are completing graduate work in their second language. Perhaps I'll attack that Spanish paragraph head-on later today.
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