Excerpt from "All Over but The Shoutin'" by Rick Bragg

Selection from "All Over but the Shoutin" by Rick Bragg. 

        He was living in a little house in Jacksonville, Alabama, a college and mill town that was the closest urban center—with it's spotlights and a high school and two supermarkets—to the
country roads we roamed in our raggedy cars. He lived in the mill village, in one of the houses the mill subsidized for their workers, back when companies still did things like that. It was not much of a place, but better than anything we ever lived in as a family. When I knocked a voice like an old woman’s, punctuated with a cough that sounded like it came from deep in the guts, told me to come in, it ain’t locked.
It was dark inside, but light enough to see what looked like a bundle of quilts on the corner of a sofa. Deep inside them was a ghost of a man, his hair and beard long and going dirty gray, his face pale and cut with deep grooves. I knew I was in the right house because my Daddy's possessions, a velvet-covered board pinned with medals, sat inside a glass cabinet on the table. But this couldn't be him.

How to Write with the Senses

You are always writing with sight.  Every time you describe something you are writing with the sense of sight.

Outside the street was empty and it was not until noon that the street filled with a large crowd of bystandaers who were all dressed in green.  

Among the crowd was a twelve-year-old boy who followed the crowd as they meandered down the street all set for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade.

Remember do not say I could see. You have already shown the image and you do not need to say you see something.  Just describe it.

It should be the same with sound. Simply describe the sound.  

The alarm began to beep loudly, jarring me out of sleep.

You do not need to say you hear it.

The hardest part is Smell, Touch and Taste.

The simple rule is never touch a touch.  Never smell a smell. Never taste a taste.

When you are descibing touch describe the physical aspect of interacting  with objects.

Michael ran his hands over the smooth service of the car, and then he stopped and checked the tires by kicking them. 

When you are showing the sense of smell--do not use the word smell. 

Use odor or scent or sniff or inhale or describe the effects.

And when you are describing taste do not say taste. Say flavor. 

Or bitterness. Or sour. Or describe putting food in your mouth.

The most valuable lesson is that writing with the senses is used primarily when you are showing emotions.

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What is a Literacy Narrative

A Literacy Narrative is a story/narrative that usually details a person's experience with Reading and/or Writing.

Usually a person starts at a young age but the writer of the Literacy Narrative has some experience under their belt which allows them the knowledge of types of forshadowing and also the creation of metaphor or symbolism.

Take "The Second-hand Bookseller" by Marina Nemat (From Prisoner of Tehran.)

The author is writing about a time when she was very young.  So the opening paragraph is also filled with lots of things:

I attended an elementary school with vine-covered brick walls.  This 

was during the time of the shah.  My school was a ten-minute walk 

from home, so I walked there and back by myself.  The old school 

building was originally a two-story mansion, and my friends had 

told me that the principle, Khanoom Mortazavi who had gone to 

university abroad, had turned it into a school once she had returned 

to Iran. Although every classroom had tall windows, because of a 

few ancient maple trees that grew in the yard, it was always dark 

inside, and we usually had to turn on the lights in order to be able to 

see the blackboard.  Every day, after the final bell, Sarah and I 

would step out of school and cross the street together, but then she 

would turn left and I would turn right.  I would continue south on 

Rahzi Avenue and walk past the tall brick walls surrounding the 

Vatican embassy, past Ashna restaurant, which filled the air with the 

smells of aromatic rice and barbecued beef, and past a small 

lingerie store with a window displaying lacy, delicate nightgowns. 

Without my mother dragging me along and telling me to walk 

properly, I sometimes pretended to be a little white cloud drifting 

across the blue sky, a ballerina dancing in front of a large crowd, or 

a boat traveling down a magical river.

As you can see Nemat starts out describing her 

surroundings—she paints a picture of a young 

child, but she also throws in a little symbolism and 

forshadowing which centers around her friend 

Sarah and the Catholic Church and the change 

brewing and predicted by the takeover by the 

Ayotollah.  

Most literacy narratives begin this way. This was 

why I have you describe the setting for a bit before 

you begin. That way you can show your age or 

allows you to think a little about your past.

In may own Literacy Narrative I start out 

describing the school I went to. 

"Learning Astronomy"

Now I write a lot about kids that ride the bus and 

the landscape of my school such as the woods.  All 

of this is foreshadowing, trying to show you how 

dangerous it was in the 80's.  There is even some 

foreboding imagry of the school being 

inescapable.  

All of it shows my age and how the child of the 

80's had little escape from Bullies and things that would not change until I was older.

In Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shoutin." 

Bragg describes how his father is living alone--he 

is sickly and how Bragg is trying to forgive his 

father.  The setting is described and it foreshadows 

his loneliness and regret.

Now in a Literacy Narrative the protagonist (That 

is you.) Goes through Reading or writing and a 

journey of discovery and at the end experiences 

some type of emotion. That is why I asked you to 

name the emotion in your outline.  

In your outline you can name it.  But in your actual 

Literacy Narrative you have to show it.  Both 

Marina Nemat and Rick Bragg have experience 

with Reading and Writing, and they describe in 

detail how they were changed and showed what 

emotion they experienced. 

So now you will go through your project and 

narrate what you did.  Then you will show me the 

emotion in the five ways we talked about.  You are 

not allowed to name the emotion—you must show 

it. 

Finally you will have to formulate an ending. 

Today you are moving through your project.