Blake Hatley’s Literacy Autobiography
Writing has been in my consciousness from the first grade moving forward. I can
remember how I was taught to write in cursive on large sheets of paper that were broken
into segments ruled by three lines. The middle line was dashes and the outside lines were
solid, indicating the boundaries that I was allowed to write within. I remember hating
writing cursive because I could not let my pencil leave the paper when writing words.
Printed words appealed to me so much more in the legible nature of their construction
that when I was given the option to stop using cursive I never thought twice and never
looked back. As a consequence of this decision, my signature closely resembles that of a
first or second grader.
My father is a big reader and when I would visit him in the summers I would read
copious amounts of science fiction and fantasy novels. This experience allowed me to
transcend my surroundings and become deeply involved in the narratives. As a result my
appetite for reading grew and I began to increase my vocabulary and understand the
structures of these narratives where the science fiction books began to seem formulaic;
the seeds of criticism began to form in my young mind. I began to form an opinion about
what good writing is through my experiences with it.
The first long story I tried to write had ideas that were loosely grafted from Daredevil, a
Marvel comic book. My protagonist was the villain Bulls eye who could make any object
into a deadly projectile and never missed his target when he threw these projectiles. I
remember the story was pretty violent and fast paced but it lacked coherence. I was in
fourth grade when I attempted this grand narrative. I wrote the paper using different color
text for different characters and different chapters. I also experimented with different
fonts. This was my first long story and my first experiences with the modern computer. I
thought the resulting story was total crap, I was always a tough critic, but in retrospect it
is very post modern, using fractured narrative patterns, experimenting with standard
formatting and having no moral to take away and no happy endings.
Middle school was not extremely helpful in my process to become a better writer because
I disliked the books we were forced to read and I was an angst and hate filled youth who
didn’t want to cooperate or listen to instructions. I only had two years of middle school
which past by quickly and I read books that I thought were good, Steinbeck, Hesse,
Hemmingway, and Faulkner. There was something about the way that these giants wrote
that was intimidating and fascinating at the same time. At the time I lacked the
vocabulary and knowledge to truly understand the deeper aspects of these novels. I did
learn that the narrative patterns and character development was far different in these
novels and the subject matter they employed was entrenched in reality not fantasy.
In High School I had several good English teachers and I learned how to write more
coherently and how to use support for my assertions more effectively. I learned how to
read a text more carefully and how to write the five paragraph essay to tackle almost any
problem. They taught me how to write an introduction that included the main points of
the body paragraphs that were to follow and how to write a specific thesis. They also
taught me how to support the thesis with the body paragraphs that were internally
supported by concrete detail drawn from the text I was making an assertion about.
After High School I joined the Air Force and learned how to fix test, measurement, and
diagnostic equipment and how to fire an M-16. This period of time was not very
conducive to my growth as a writer, but I was allowed after a year or so to take some
college classes at the local University of Maryland annex. I was introduced to a college
composition class at the age of 19 and found it to be rather droll. I remember writing a
report, argument, analysis, and research paper in this class. I wrote a theory about why
there was so much road kill on the island of Guam. I remember everyone in the class did
peer critiques and people thought my topic was funny and the writing was good. I
continued to take classes when I went to Germany and learned under a professor who had
studied with Edward Said in New York while doing her doctorates. There were many
discussions regarding what academic writing should look and sound like. I don’t know
how much I gained from the classes I took abroad. They seemed more like repetition of
the same information that I had learned in High School and from books I had read.
When I came to Texas Tech I was excited to be learning about how to write better and
read more critically, but many of my undergraduate courses seemed to be an extension of
the same processes I had experienced up to this point. I took a course with Dr. Cristobal
Silva and was introduced to close reading as a means to unpack meaning inside of a
passage. This process helped me a great deal in my critical writing because it gave me
another tool to approach a text with. This process helped me to think more critically and
to look closer at what the authors of texts are doing rather than looking at surface level
metaphor usage or something like it. In my senior seminar at Tech I took a big step in
becoming a better writer. My professor did not have any structure to the course. He pretty
much introduced us students to certain texts that he enjoyed and said “I’d like you to
write something.” He gave no specifics and this put the burden of what to write about
back on my shoulders. This forced me to be creative and got me out of the rigmarole of
answering prompts presented by a professor in a five paragraph essay with a given word
count.
I am now taking graduate level classes that are structured but also have a great deal of
personal freedom in terms of what the student should write about. I have learned how to
cite sources differently than I had become accustomed to. I used to quote and then
explain the quotes context, meaning and how it supported my thesis or main point. I have
since seen that many academics do not use long quotations; rather they will rephrase
some of the information presented by the author and then maybe include a sentence long
quote. I am learning to cut out filler in my papers so that I do not waste my reader’s time
with unnecessary explanations. I am constantly learning something new to improve my
writing style and I expect this trend to continue, because even the best writers can
improve. Literacy is not something that you just learn and are done with. It is a rigorous
process that a person continues to refine their writing in the hopes of approaching
perfection.