Writing Cultural Literacy
In this part of Decoding Cultural Literacy, you’ll be able to:
- Apply the steps in reading cultural literacy to produce comprehensible writing
- Articulate a message through effective writing
- Learn a step-by-step process of constructing your claims for simple arguments
- Apply effective notes to writing to support claims
- Define metacognition and apply it to your writing
- Address counterarguments and logical fallacies that can exist in media
Writing Media’s Messages
Writing cultural literacy will always come back to analysis, as pointed out in Part II. Analysis involves engaging with a piece of media and fully immersing oneself in its message in order to decode its central points. Additionally, analysis can involve digesting the piece’s message at face value and doing background research to analyze the cultural literacy that informed it, which will, in turn, inform your perspective of the piece. When writing about cultural literacy, it is always effective to ask oneself questions like these:
- Did you understand the book well enough to articulate its plot?
- Did you understand the movie well enough to convey its themes?
- Did you understand the song well enough to discuss the story it told?
It is best to reflect on these questions from your own perspective and then conduct research to support the claims you are making in your writing.
As stated in Part II, keep in mind that while you are analyzing cultural literacy, you are also assessing the communicator’s authorial credibility on the subject matter in order to ethically decode the message. Therefore, to avoid stereotypes and biases, you must be conscious of your own authorial credibility if you are writing about a discourse community outside of your own. There are several ways to avoid stereotypes and biases during analysis and when beginning the writing process. Listed below are some ways to ensure the claims you are making as the communicator are not solely based on opinion:
- Utilizing direct quotes
- Examining the characters
- Scenes that reflect the message
- Research about the background information
- Research about the specific communicator
