Reading Literacy Narrative
As a child, reading was the only way to sooth myself to sleep. Whether it was my mom’s soft voice reading the words, or me trying to squeeze in one last chapter before bedtime, reading was my lullaby. I started off at a young age of reading lengthy chapter books because my mother wanted to prepare me early for school reading. I found this to be very helpful, starting off at a young age, because by the time I was in high school I was eligible for college reading.
As my reading progressed, I learned to skim my reading passages. Looking for particular words that would lead me to my answer. In other words, I taught myself specific reading comprehension techniques. What I’ve noticed, as a reader, is that when you’re deep into a book that you admire, everything seems to slip away from you. What’s around you becomes non existing and your mind begins to act as a television, playing what you read in your mind. This is what happens to me whenever I read action books with romance in it. Reading is my passion, not only because it’s my hobby but also because I feel it enriches people with intelligence and comprehension of things. Reading books allows others to expand their vocabulary while magazine articles can open our minds to learn new things. However, today’s day in age, people turn to audiobooks. Audiobooks are great for those who rather sleep and listen or multi task and listen, but I’m not one of those people. I prefer seeing the words flow from the page and into my mind; forming that motion picture movie in my mind.
When starting college, I was terrified that I wasn’t going to make it far in my English classes because I wasn’t as good as a writers as the other students were. However, college has proven to advance my understanding of writing and reading. I’ve learned that in order to accomplish writing a research paper, I needed to go through multiple steps. The first step was to skim the article, or research topic, for any big words that I didn’t know. After skimming the article, I would then proceed to grab a highlighter and sit down and read the entire article; highlighting any vocabulary words that I needed to look up. When I finished, I would take another highlighter, but in a different color, and highlight any facts that would be useful to use in my research paper to back up my statement. After reading the article at least three times, I would then begin my rough draft for my essay. A lot of people ask why I reread my topic so many times; the truth is that it really does help when you reread an article. The first time I read something, I get the general idea of the topic. The second time going through it, I read a little slower to grab any facts that would back up my thesis statement in my essay. The third time is only to go back and triple check myself that I didn’t leave any other important facts out that I could use.
If a research essay requires me to obtain more information from multiple websites, I lean more towards using Cornell Notes. The reason why I use Cornell Notes for this type of note taking is because it is organized. It’s a hassle to set up but using the Cornell note taking strategy helps me keep my information and facts in line. When I move from website to website, I use a different page for each one, so each page can represent a body paragraph for my paper. Cornell not taking allows me to focus on one fact at a time. As a finish up my research on one website, I finish up the notes by citing the webpage and summarizing the notes. Each summary that I write helps me format what I will write in my research essay. The summaries essentially become the paragraphs that are within my essay, but with a few changes here and there.
Only one summer of a college English class has completely changed the way I start off writing an essay. At first, I started off only reading an article once and making a view notes here and there. Now I have a step by step process of creating my research essays, organized and correctly. Continuing my college career, I plan on continuing to use these methods for writing my research papers to insure that they formatted and professional written.