Quotes on Writing

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Toni Morrison

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Anais Nin

“The first draft of anything is shit.” Ernest Hemingway

“When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others short. Some are thick, others thin. Some are heavy. Others are light.” Edwidge Danticat

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than other people.” Thomas Mann

“You can make anything by writing.” CS Lewis

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” Virginia Woolf

“Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” Barbara Kingsolver

Quotes on Reading

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” George RR Martin

“We read to know we are not alone.” William Nicholson

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” Oscar Wilde

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” Stephen King

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Ray Bradbury

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” Charles William Eliot

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” William Styron

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” Ursula K Le Guin

“Read absolutely everything you get your hands on because you’ll never know where you’ll get an idea from…” Malcolm X

Both writing and reading take us on journeys. We may not always know precisely the destination and once we set off, we can get lost, return, re-trace our steps, stumble, even fall, but we will always land somewhere new.

LITERACY ASSIGNMENT:

For this assignment you will have several choices:

Please choose one of these options:

For each of these, we will write a 2 to 3 page essay. We will discuss more details in class about how we can approach organizing our ideas. I also welcome visual images if they help you to explore your ideas. We will use MLA format for our assignment which we also will review in class.

Option 1: Please reflect on an experience with reading or writing that was significant in your life. Please discuss what you learned about reading or writing through this experience. Based on this experience, please come up with a strategy for reading or writing that you feel would help others in their own lives. Why or how can your experience be helpful to others? What kind of statements or observations can you make about literacy based on your experience. You can come up with a motto about literacy based on your ideas.

Option 2:

Please reflect on one of the texts that we have read about others’ experiences with reading or writing. Specifically, please discuss what you think is most important about this literacy text using specific examples from the text. Please then think about how this author’s understanding of reading or writing relates to your own life or to someone in your life. The task is to compare the author’s ideas about reading or writing with your own or with someone whom you know well. If you choose to discuss someone else’s experience, please be sure to use specific details of his or her experiences to compare to the text/author that you have chosen.

Option 3:

Please write your own theory of writing or reading as if you wanted to help others to learn more about literacy. You can approach this option in several ways: you can come up with a set of rules or instructions about how we should approach reading and writing and use a text that we have read so far to illustrate these ideas—what strategies did you use to read the text for example? What helped you to understand the deeper meanings in the text? You can describe an important or transformative experience that you or someone else had with reading or writing, and, based on that experience, come up with ideas about reading or writing that you can share with others that might help them to understand more about their own reading and writing. You can combine these options: take an experience that you had and connect it to a text that we read: how did your experience help you to read and respond to the text?