Literacy Narrative

For this blogpost, I chose to read an excerpt from Malcolm X’s autobiography titled “Learning to Read”. 

Photo from Wikipedia

I believe that the text is structured in a way that highlights the importance of education, no matter the environment. There are also highlights about how important education is in prison, and that knowing how to articulate words properly can let you lead conversations and to be able to express yourself in letters to other people.

Photo from Al Jazeera America

The arguments made for literacy are about how the lack of literacy sets you behind from so many people with poor reading and writing skills. In the prison that Malcolm was sentenced to, the people who are more interested in books and literacy tend to be favored upon by the administration and are extremely popular with the other inmates as they have immense knowledge compared to the people who are not involved in the literacy. The prison that Malcolm was sentenced in had provided such a great supply of books, weekly debates held by inmates and classes taught by professors from prestigious universities like Harvard and Brown. Having these resources helped push Malcolm to focus on his literacy after he had struggled writing a letter to his mentor, Elijah Muhammad. The debates that would take place could spark immense argument and conversation between inmates, which helped prove that literacy is important for everyone. If there was no literacy among the inmates, there would be less debate and less need for prisons to keep stock of literary materials.

Photo from The Guardian

I believe that most of the elements that appear in this text are important and that they should all be learned and used when applicable, but I would choose the casual yet serious tone that is used throughout the text. I selected this element because it makes a text easier to understand for certain audiences and that allows a broader spectrum of people to understand and enjoy the text you have made. Being able to accommodate as many extra audiences and people that you can is very important for your text because you can share your thoughts and ideas to as many people as you possibly can.