Literacy as Social

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about literacy being social. When I was a teenager, my father started a construction company. My dad knew construction, he was good at it. But he struggled with writing. He didn’t now how to write business proposals and invoices, and while he tried to learn and he knew what he wanted to say, he struggled with how to say it. He was unsure how to word certain phrases so he would ask me for help. But I struggled as well. I had no idea how to write proposals and invoices. I considered myself a good writer. I have never struggled with any type of writing until this. So in order to help my dad out (and of course I was helping myself and the rest of my family because if my dad can’t get proposals and invoices sent out, he can’t get paid) I had to learn how to do this type of writing. While my dad could have hired someone else to do this, I wanted to be the one getting paid, but I also wanted to figure it out so my dad didn’t have to worry about finding someone reliable and trustworthy. So I figured it out. I spent hours searching online for examples of business proposals and trying to mimic these examples. I was eventually able to figure it out. While there was some financial gain in learning, my biggest goal was to help my dad and make his job easier and less stressful and if not for this, I probably would have never learned how to write documents like this.