Throughout my life I have developed a transparent love for literacy. Only recently have I begun to appreciate how invaluable literacy really is. Although it goes unseen, literacy is the foundation of knowledge and without it nothing would have meaning. I am lucky to have been a literate person since the first few years of my education, learning to read and express myself through writing and speech. I've made the realization that I have always had a love for the communication of information through reading books, manuals, or websites and being able to write or speak about the information I possess in order to share it with others. Being literate has allowed me to gain valuable knowledge that I will use for my remaining lifetime. I've developed a new appreciation for literacy that would have totally redefined my learning experience during grade school had I made this realization earlier. Perhaps instead of dreading reading chapters, writing essays or solving lengthy equations I once thought were meaningless wastes of time, I would have viewed them as checkpoints aimed towards perfecting my own literary practices. What used to seem like busy work from elementary school up to junior high, I now see as crucial building blocks necessary in developing and honing linguistic and compositional skills. These skills allow me as an individual to understand my environment and interact with those around me efficiently and effectively. Literary skills allow for the conveying of ideas and they also define being an individual through self-expression in forms such as poetry or writing to share experiences. Essentially this realization has shown me that progressing through the levels of education has not only given me a complex understanding of being a literate individual but cleared the path for the furthering of my literary skills as a college student attending Central Michigan University.
My younger self was more oblivious than I am now to the importance of literacy development.