Amanda Ramjohn

Literacy Memoir
Ms. Knudson
UWRT-1102-01
Journey Behind the Text
Writing is beautiful. Writing is what happens after all the thoughts in the minds of
humans are transferred into reality on a piece of paper. Writing has its own forms of personality
and can be stored so that we have a key to the past. Communication is the key. They say that the
most elaborate system of symbols is language and I thank god that I am literate. This journey
has been long and meaningful so far down my path of literacy and I have accomplished many
inner goals when it comes to writing. I am here at this point successfully talking about my own
literacy due to my recollection of my literate events, the development of my writing skills and
the accumulation of my thoughts and values on writing and literacy period.
In the beginning, we all start off just about the same: crawling around like little
animals and mumbling potential words. When I was about the age of 4 or 5 my parents bought
me a reading device called a Leapfrog Reader. It was basically a giant book containing
different stories, maps of the world, the body of the human skeleton, etc. There were buttons on
the side of the big book that controlled actions such as the book reading the stories or parts of the
pages to me. It came with a big marker-looking thing which was the stylus. The purpose of the
stylus was for me to touch the words or phrases that I was unfamiliar with and the narrator of the
book would read it back to me. I also had a million CD-ROMs that contained reading and
writing comprehension games. I was easily entertained as a child and I am thankful that my

parents used that as an advantage to help me learn how to read and write. Luckily, I was born in
this era of technology and I must say it has played a big role, in my reading, comprehension, and
writing, from the past to the present. Around the ages of seven through nine, English was my
best and favorite subject in elementary school. Punctuation, grammar and spelling were always
my specialties. I was a great competitor in classroom spelling bees. Along with my infatuation
with the treasure box, I always had a feeling of confidence and superiority to the other kids in
class because I actually believed that I was ahead or smarter than them due to my reading
devices at home. In the fourth grade, there was a big writing session for all of the 4th grade class.
It was similar to a writing placement test for the teachers to see where the students were in terms
of their creativity, vocabulary and their first tackle on writing prompts. Looking back now, I felt
like that age was the beginning of all my big imaginations and skills of interpreting them onto
paper. I had spent a lot of time prior to the writing test preparing myself until I got more and
more comfortable with responding directly and correctly to given prompts. My imagination and
open-mindedness played a big role in the flow and originality of my paper and I was only about
ten years old! I owe this all to my fascination and knowledge that came from my leapfrog reader
and the CD-ROMS I spent all my time on. My parents were also very helpful themselves with
taking the right amount of time and care to strengthen my literate mind. My newly discovered
writing skills paid off because my paper ended up being chosen, along with several other papers
of fourth grade students, to be awarded and also used as an example for future fourth graders
when given practice prompts.
After I graduated from elementary school and started middle school I was fresh for the
real stuff, the actual essays and writing assignments. As a younger child I had more patience and
loved writing, but then having to complete actual essays regularly made me anxious and

frustrated. I felt like I had lost my creativity mojo because every grade was a step closer to
reality and more formal and serious writing. I did manage to maintain my sanity however, in the
middle of seventh grade is when I began to pay attention to and take interest in poems and
meaningful verses and rhythms. I started to realize the importance of being open and thinking
about how I wanted to interpret my words and make them sound. During my free-time when I
was not out playing with friends I wrote lyrics. Not particularly meant for songs yet; just some
words and verses with rhythm and fluency. I even used alliteration before I even knew that there
was a word for it. I love music. I always have and I always will. Songs are made by thoughtful
words and writing. My parents enrolled me in guitar lessons around the same time of my poetry
outbreak. My guitar instructor was an inspirational woman and took interest in my little hobby.
She started writing chords for the poems I was making and, at the beginning of the eighth grade,
I had a song. The only sad thing about it was that I could not sing, how tragic. I had my first
guitar recital at a small Italian restaurant in Charlotte and got to play the chords to my own song
while my guitar instructor sang the words I wrote. Luckily, she actually had that talent which
saved my recital from being an instrumental mess. My parents were proud and shortly after, that
was the end of that. I met a boy at the end of eighth grade and you know how that goes, you
sometimes get persuaded to do the things that they do. This boy was into rap music and rappers
such as Eminem and Tupac and I clearly was not, but life moves forward and I gave it a try. I
soon had tons of dollar tree composition books filled with rap verses. It was not too different
from what I was doing before and that was another thing that I realized I loved about writing. I
could change and shape the diction and tone of my writing pieces to however I desired them to
be. I even recited the verses I wrote to the beats of songs because hey, it does not require a
singing voice to do such. I did stay with that for a little while until my sophomore year of high

school I realized I was a big idiot and was too carefree about the lengths and content of my
papers and started becoming focused on the serious, formal writing again. By serious and
formal I mean by the way my high school teachers wanted the paper to be.
Sophomore year of high school I was enrolled in a course called Speech and Debate and
it required us to dress in business attire and speak strongly on the topics that we felt passionate
about. That was all love for me because that was the first time I got to expose and exercise my
argumentative and opinionated behavior for a good cause (making those As). I loved to argue
about things I was so sure about. I felt this way, and still do, because I was raised to believe that
I have a say in things and that my opinions matter as much as every elses in the world regardless
of race, ethnicity, culture or financial status. I was good at creating arguments for that class and
was always good at transferring the thoughts that were in my head, out to the audience in the
clearest way possible. When we had library sessions in order to prepare for our debates, I was
always researching and making sure that I was on top of things because looking stupid was
definitely one of my biggest fears in front of a crowd of people. At this point in time I realized
the importance of order and structure in writing pieces. The order in which the words were put
showed big differences when I arranged them. For example, in general if you are responding to
someones question asking if you liked something, saying I really dont and I dont really are
two completely different things, it is the same exact words, just in different order.
Acknowledging this while writing my arguments helped me make them firm.
The development of my writing skills so far has come from me growing as a
person and being exposed to more forms of writing, but for some reason I will never feel like I
can reach the point of perfectionism as a writer. I do not really believe there is an end point or a
certain perfect goal when it comes to writing; in other words, all the classes and courses being

taken from elementary school to college are not ascending to the main point. There just simply
is no main point. There is just an open world with no limitations, rights or wrongs; just room for
more literacy accomplishments. I enjoy having a different approach every time I write
something- a different style; and I am sure that might be a similar case for many people that
enjoy writing as much as I do. I make my writing seem like it was kind of perfect in my amateur
years, but sometimes it was hard for me to write assignments because my parents speak to me
differently than Americans do. My family originates from an island in the Caribbean called
Trinidad and Tobago and they speak in an accent. The accent is of English words, but some
things they would say backwards or completely different and it would not be grammatically
correct in America. That was definitely a struggle I faced during my literacy moments because
living at home and hearing my family speak to me was my life other than school so I had to learn
how to turn the accent on and off.
The writing skills that I have developed within myself came from an
accumulation of all the different things I have realized down my path of literacy. As a child
writing for us was used with imagination and then as an adult it simply turned into just being
open-minded and being open to words in terms of vocabulary and having a wide interpretation of
your thoughts. I tend to pick up new strategies before I start papers very often now, in order to
keep moving forward instead of sticking to the same tactics all the time; that is when it gets
boring. After reading the article Shitty First Drafts, by Anne Lamott, I definitely had a belief
in writing as many drafts as possible until my papers felt right. Now, I currently picked up a new
brainstorming technique that I am very interested in and I hope to conquer more as time goes on.
In conclusion, I am glad I had this opportunity to tell a story of my
life; the literacy version. My writing is better now than it was before and I am sure I will be able

to say the same thing every semester. I am thankful for the goals and values that I have achieved
and obtained so far due to the recollection of my literary events, development of my writing
skills and all of the thoughts I have accumulated so far about the general idea of writing. Writing
is important. Writing is beautiful.