Literacy to write

Our social view of social literacy changes every decade based on the parameters of how our society changes. Also social literacy is an idea that groups all people into one pot when we are talking about literacy. The problem with that is not all people want or strive to be on the same literacy track as the next person. However individual literacy as a pursuit I think is a person’s decision to peruse or not peruse literacy based on their own life, background, goals and motivation. The indivuial pursuit greatly out weights the social view of literacy in my opinion.

While reading Williams this quote caught my attention. “Literacy was implicitly defined as the reading of great books that make one a great person rather than as rhetorically effective communication.” I question, how does reading “great books” create a “great person?” And who would this “great person look like?” Because Scribner fits right in and says “definitions of literacy shape our perceptions of individuals who fall on either side of the standard…” Now me looking at the two quotes as a whole I see this as, Okay I am a Mexican American and I don’t read the great books like Himingway, Dickens and etc. but I rather read the great books that define me as Latina such as Funtes, Allende. Is it because I live in America and born here am I illiterate because I choose not to read those books and I am therefore not a great person according to the social view of literacy.

How did I learn to read/write in different registers is a question I can never fully answer. I am not sure how it came about but I think the different demands in different areas on my life called for something specific I needed to learn based on observation and trial-and-error. For some reason I remember pretending to write using a paper and pencil, but just writing squiggles on the paper. What I wrote was not legible to the trained eye but I knew what it said because I was the creator. I cannot remember my elementary school training in writing but trying to study another language and learning to write in the target language made me think about how I never formally learned the rules of writing but wrote based on the sentences I heard and spoke. Whereas with learning my target language I need to learn the rules of writing. I learned those rules from the teacher and the “sponsered” books I was focred to read.  The purpose of writing at that point was academic but never for pleasure therefore I only learned one type of writing register. But I do see the connection of literacy as a means to write because we are people who imitate what we see and hear. Literacy is more that just push words out of ones mouth but drawing them out on paper-yes the old fashion way.