With success there is the constant risk for complacency, this is true in all realms of human achievement whether it be sports, the arts, or the professional world those that achieve at times find themselves overly satisfied and thus are destine to fade into the background before their time. As an athlete and competitor this has been almost like a phobia of mine; the fear of becoming complacent in using the successful habits that can eventually lead to the stifling of process of innovation and recreation.  My journey though literacy has been one reminiscent of this idea, similar the metaphor of “Plato’s Cave”. An escape from the dark constructs of my mind developed in the hall of public school’s “5 paragraph structure”, onto the path of literary growth my freshman year of college, and now the constant struggle for healthy literary consistency and academic reinvention.
            The journey begins like so many others; after 12+ years of public school my perception of what made a good page equated to five paragraphs, two us which are mirrors of each other and the three paragraphs in between are simple regurgitations of some points from class, Wikipedia and maybe the occasional “in my opinion.  At this point I had the formula down to a pseudoscience and I thought I was well on my way to becoming an accomplished writer.
It wasn’t until after I had graduated and began taking summer courses at Georgetown did things changed.  It wasn’t as if this was my first time away from home, but it was the first time I was expected to develop my own academic opinion.  My first college paper required me to.  The prompt (the price of a personal fantasy) was too personal to rely on any of my old tricks from high school.   It is clear that through my self-analysis of that paper that I was able to cause a collision between my underdeveloped conceptions of academic writing and my personal experiences.  This paper was my first clumsy step out of “The Cave”.  For the first time I was expected to forsake that which had always be comfortable.
This collision led to the development of my voice as a writer and as a young adult.  As you read the paper it flows very much like a stream of consciousness; every idea in each paragraph only loosely relating to the next, similar to a monologue. The structure of this paper is still reminiscent of high school, with the use of long dense paragraphs that at times hold more than one sub-idea.  The choice to make the “topic sentence” the top of the paper as its own paragraph not only emphasizes the statement it makes but also acts as a lighthouse for readers who may become lost in the heavy pathological appeal and lose track of the assertion within this paper as they read.  If nothing else this technique is clearly an act of rebellion targeting the 5 paragraph structure, almost acting as a detox, removing whatever previous notions of what good writing is in an attempt to purify myself and find my own voice.  The same can be said for the content of the paper itself.
The entirely of the paper is drenched in emotion, either with direct personal accounts or through the use of metaphors to paint a picture of my life.  Throughout the paper I return to this metaphor of a tree to represent my family and the family I compare it to.  The imagery of the tree metaphor also acts as a stable structure guiding the reader as they travel with the writer through this flow of consciousness and eventual realization.
I figure if I’m able to create a situation where the audience is able to grasp the discussion through my viewpoint; now any counter argument or concession must be made under my terms and through a lens that I have a better grasp of. There has rarely been a time in class or while tutoring where I did not incorporate some form of simile into the discussion to get my point across, or at the very least lighten the conversation. With that paper with all its rawness and pathological appeal I gained maybe my greatest literary tool as well as my mantra for my writing.          
            I believe that in this stage in my literary growth I have all but eliminated any reminisce of the five paragraph style of writing and for the most part I have developed enough of an understanding of literacy to be able to incorporate my voice into any genre of writing.   While I realize I am in no way finished with my journey through literacy I think that the best example of how far along my growth has come is the paper I wrote in my humanities course a few semesters back.  The theme of the course was the “American dream through the eyes of the minority”.  The paper itself was titled Idealizing Barbie.  This paper combines many of the literary techniques that I have developed through my immersion in Georgetown culture combined with an understanding of my thought process and my voice as an academic.
            One of my favorite techniques when writing essays is to approach the paper never using first person pronouns like “I” or “me”.  I believe by avoiding the use of these pronouns it gives the paper more of an informative yet authoritative tone. A rhetorical tactic I picked up from the reading of almost every textbook I’ve ever read in high school and in college. Avoiding these personal pronouns creates a setting in the paper that makes it seem less like personal opinion and more like indisputable fact since there is no indication of personal opinion in the text.  At the same time I like for my papers to have a conversational tone, so while avoiding first-person pronouns, I often when possible write using a blend of colloquial language as well as more academic terms.  This blend of language can be traced back to the many a combinations of 2 am political discussions in common rooms and 6pm shouting matches between the men in my family over the drawbacks and benefits of zone blizs on 3rd and three on the goal line during the Thanksgiving NFL game.  Just as it is essential for me to convey believability in my vocal discussions, I want to convey the same sense of believability in my writing whiles still coming across as an authority in the subject.  In both personal discussion and academic writing sounding “too academic” will either come off as not authentic or as regurgitated data, while using too much  of a common tongue will neutralize the effects of the non-personal authoritative tone.
            Another technique I found beneficial in this paper, like many others is the seamless insertion of quotes from sources I have researched for the paper with my own words.   By integrating their language with mine it conveys the image that this credible source and I share the same opinion, thus in some ways give me and my stance more credibility.  In addition by integrating parts of quotes into my writing it becomes difficult to differentiate between what parts of my paper is my opinion or a summary of my sources, making it difficult to target a point and challenge its credibility.  You can see the use of this tactic throughout the Barbie piece.
            Of all the literary techniques I’ve developed over the years none is more quintessential   to my writing then my use of a hermeneutic paragraph structure in my papers to convey my ideas and walk the audience through subtopics.  By breaking these subtopics into smaller paragraphs with even more concise sentences that build upon each other step by step I can walk the audience through my thought almost like a GPS from beginning to end. This not only makes clear that I understand my point from its most elementary level to its more complex but it also allows for an audience with almost no prior knowledge to grasp the ideas and work with them and asses the ideas critically.  This technique is much more professional than the technique used in my first paper of making the topic sentence its own paragraph.
Of all the literacy devices I use this one is at the core of my definition of literacy; the ability to take a complex idea break it down to its basic elements, convey those ideas and then rebuild them for the audience.  The use of hermeneutics can convey an authoritative confident tone as well as create the perfect platform for the use of the other literary techniques I commonly integrate into my writing.
The last of common sense tools I use in every paper, is the swap.  With literally every paper I have written in my college career I have, by the end, swapped my introduction with my conclusion paragraph.  The reason for this swap is that by the end of the paper when I arrive at the conclusion I have fleshed out the main points of my paper and condensed my ideas into a more fluid format than in the intro.  The history of this technique has been more or less just trial and error, but I’ve found that by time I reach my conclusion I have come full circle and at this point swapping these paragraphs creates a better flow for the paper as well as gives me a strong lead off which makes the rest of the paper better.
The most interesting aspect of my journey is as I write this paper, I find myself using the very techniques I am describing and become conscious of my concerns over complacency.  I worry that unknowingly have I walked right back into the cave.  I believe that my struggle with writing history papers may be evidence that am indeed again trapped in “the cave” but perhaps one of my own creations this time around thus making it harder to recognize as such.  I recognize that in my pursuit of my academic voice I will at time become satisfied.  But the very recognition of that constant may be the key to overcoming the appeal of self-satisfaction