• Purpose: For students to understand their own reading and writing practices. Literacy narratives are usually a more formal and polished “write-to-learn” assignment. 
  
• Audience: Both instructors and the student-author him or herself. 
  
• Author: A reading and/or writing student becoming meta-cognitively aware of his or her own practices so that s/he understands what reading and writing skills to continue working towards. 
  
• Context: Usually a formal classroom environment; many instructors assign this project earlier in a term so that students understand where they are coming from and where they need to move forward. Instructors sometimes have students revisit the assignment at the end of a course to reflect upon what they have learned. 
  
• Topic: Literacy narratives usually focus on one specific person or incident that greatly impacted the author’s understanding of how and why s/he reads or writes in a particular manner. Some popular topics include: reading as a child, first time writing on a computer or mobile device, reading in a video game, or composing a letter or social media message. 
  
• Delivery: As a narrative, literacy narratives are usually more linear with a beginning, middle, and end. Traditional alphabetic text narratives usually focus on highly detailed sensory descriptions, dialogue, dramatic tension, and description of significance, or “so what.” Multimedia texts allow authors to highly emphasize a specific detail (usually visual or aural) and may provide a more interpretative on the story and “so what” message. Friends and family are usually very excited to read this type of work; publishing in an easy-to-share online environment make your final product easy to share. 

• highly detailed sensory descriptions: Authors use sensory details (sight, sound, smell, taste, tough) to construct concrete images of people, places, and things. Detailed descriptions also help with the “show, don’t tell” philosophy of story tellers; show that you had read the book “hundreds” of times by describing its broken spine, yellowed and falling out pages, and hot chocolate stains. 
  
• dialogue: In stories about real life people are usually communicating with one another. Dialogue helps keep a story interesting. 
  
• Reality Check: Dialogue is not required; however, it is helpful to use dialogue making the description of significance (or “so what?”). Dialogue can also be internal dialogue, like one of Shakespeare’s monologues. If you decide for a monologue, be realistic in what you would really think and say to yourself. 
• dramatic tension: Good stories resolve an issue or some conflict. On the way to resolution, there are usually one or two tense moments where the two (or more) sides face off. Realize that an issue does not have to be between people; a conflict can be “learning to read” or “saying something to your boss.” 
  
• description of significance: What is the point of sharing a story if you don’t want to say something with it (your rhetorical purpose)? Many literacy narratives are about how hard work paid off; not that you can’t share that story, but consider trying for an alternative “so what?” like “I understood texting my mom and friends was different” or “to be successful in my favorite video games I needed to read online support websites carefully.” 
  
• Reality Check: Not only does your significance not need to be “the moral of this story is…,” most people do not want it to be. If you carefully select and use your dramatic tension, sensory details, and dialogue, your reader will “know” the significance at the end. Test whether or not your story is working by having friends and family members read it and then tell you what they think the “moral” is. 

• Beginning and Ending: Beginning and ending stories can be difficult; think about how different movies handle it. Some just start in the middle of the action, others provide a short history, others follow a character to get a sense of time and space. Make sure your beginning or ending is not too long descriptive without action. 
  
• Focusing Your Point: Good short stories (it is unlikely you are being asked to write a novel) focus on a particular person, place, event, or object. Focus your story and only include details that are relevant to your focused “thing” and the significance or “so what?”
  
• Comparing and Contrasting: Sometimes you make a point about a person, place, or thing by comparing it to another person, place, or thing. Make sure that the details you use to compare the two things are relevant to the point of the comparison; for example, if book length and genre is important to compare, but the color of the cover of the book is not, do not include details about the cover of the book. 
  
• Analyzing Cause & Effects: For many authors of literacy narratives, their significance comes from something they learned. In other words, some event happened (cause) and the author learned something (effect). Only include details in the event that are relevant to demonstrating what was learned. 

Multimedia Challenges