This page is from the fourth page of my third paper. In this paragraph, I am talking about Kayla’s experience with a poor literacy sponsor. The quote highlighted in yellow, “it just seemed to slowly eat away at any confidence I had left over.”(Farrel 2), is the most impactful quote of the story. It shows how Mr. Stritch was a negative sponsor in Kayla’s life. In green is how I integrated my quote into my claim.
Framing Statement: Over the course of this semester, I greatly advanced my ability to integrate ideas into text. For my Significant Writing Project, I chose my third paper of the year as I believe it best exemplifies my progress over the semester. For this paper, I dove into the various narratives, child prodigy, literacy success, and victim. Using the story sharing website Medium, I was able to find personal stories about people who have either been or became said narratives. I used their stories and integrated quotes about their experience with literacy to support my claim that the future of child prodigies can be determined by their sponsor. Furthermore, I related stories that had similar experiences and picked out what went differently. Both Kayla Farrell and Blake Beverage showed signs of the child prodigy narrative. Yet, while Blake had Mrs. Johnson to push him in the right direction, Kayla had Mr. Stritch, who completely ruined her confidence as a writer. This difference in sponsors was the reason one became a literacy success and the other became a victim.
Both Kayla and Blake started in similar places, yet ended up as very different narratives. To exemplify this, I chose quotes that supported my claim. I made sure to compare the two of the biggest quotes from both stories together. “At the time I felt like my teacher was singling me out for such a small mistake… I see now that she was holding me to a higher standard because she knew I had the ability to succeed in my work,” (Beverage 2). Blake understands that his teacher was being hard on him because she wanted him to succeed, he learned from his mistake and was able to move on as a writer, the same cannot be said for Kayla. “This was an important moment in my life because this is when my views on reading and writing changed and unfortunately it has never been turned back around. Teachers have bigger impacts on students then they think they do” (Farrell 2). These two quotes highlighted where two child prodigies ended up, so I added them into my essay when talking about the various outcomes a child prodigy could end up.
Along with integrating quotes, I felt that I had a good shift between “they say” and “I say” in my papers. This can be most evident in paper three- “From parents to teachers, to their own influence, child prodigies deal with an extraordinary amount of pressure to be the best. This pressure and stress can make it or break it in some people. The countless nights studies until the early hours of the morning, the pressure to have the highest grade in the class, personally I pity child prodigies. Growing up, I have seen dozens of child prodigies have complete breakdowns from all the stress.” Not only do I state how stress can affect a child prodigy, but I add in my own experience with it. A good balance between “they say” and ” I say” makes the essay feel more grounded
