July 3, 2006
*What literacies are you comfortable with and use often? How did you come to obtain these literacies? In what environment? What motivated you to obtain them? Are they "compatible" with academic literacies or not, and how?

I am comfortable with reading contemporary fiction, mystery novels, academic articles, bills, ads, newspaper articles, websites, and many forms of written texts. I am comfortable writing business letters, academic articles, reviews, research notes, emails to colleagues and students, writing assignments, daily plans, etc. The main environments I work in are the university and my home--for family stuff. I am not comfortable writing in other environments, such as advertising, marketing, business, fund raising, etc. I was motivated by my ambition to succeed at this job and my desire to obtain knowledge and to communicate with others in the field of composition studies, to join the conversation of scholars in that field.

I guess I'm hard pressed to identify a literacy I use or possess that is not compatible with academic literacies--maybe fluency in children's movies and young girl's toys--for example, I know what a Polly Pocket is. I used to write silly catalog copy--that was very unlike what I do now--it was incompatible b/c it used very small words and very short pieces of text to communicate to an audience of folks who wanted to order things through the mail for $1. Kind of the same appeal as the dollar stores today.

One way that I relate to students who might be very uncomfortable with academic literacies is to think of times I've tried to write in an entirely new genre and failed--once for a fund-raising campaign and once for a venture-capital company--both attempts were utterly wrong, and I was not given a second chance. That helps me to remember what it feels like to be asked to write something completely foreign and failing miserably at it.