After she received the assignment, Nguyen considered several possible directions before settling on her focus. To get started, she listed some people who had influenced her writing development and brainstormed about her experiences in ESL classrooms.

As she reviewed her notes, she realized that she was most excited about focusing her story on one influential person, a kind old man whose home was a safe haven away from her noisy Hanoi neighborhood. Because the assignment asked her to make a larger point about learning to write, she decided that a good strategy would be to identify something surprising about these experiences, although she wasn’t sure at first what that might be.

The notes in color are the writer’s further thoughts, written a few hours after she composed the original list.

Sample notes

Other steps in the process:

Peer review (literacy narrative)

Developing revision goals and revising the draft (literacy narrative)