Evans 1Halle EvansL.M. Raymond, MAUWRT 11038 July 2015Writing Prompt #2: What Has Advanced My Literacy SkillsSomething that I associate with helping my reading skills in high school is the books we were assigned to read throughout those four years. In middle school, I never liked the books that the teachers would assign for my class to read. They all bored me and I could never get fully into them. The only one I remember actually liking was S.E. Hintons The Outsiders which I read in seventh grade. Although I enjoyed it, it doesnt come close to some of the books that I read in high school. Stories such as Homers The Odyssey (9th grade), Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (10th grade), Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God (11th grade), and Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (12th grade) made my English classes in my high school years interesting and kept me responsive to the material presented in these classes. With each book, I felt my literacy skills growing stronger each time a story was finished in any of my classes. It was rare that I read a book that was not assigned throughout the school year unlike in middle school when Id skip nightly readings to read other novels that I would find at the library. These books encouraged me to find stories that I liked better during summer breaks between school years. Most of the time when my friends called and asked me to hang out I would turn down their invitations so I could finish a book I had started a few days earlier. Although I missed out on some fun events, I dont regret choosing to read. This has made me a better reader, writer, and overall person. Literacy I have voluntarily or involuntarily read has benefited me in too many ways to count and it has also made my literacy skills stronger than they would be without those books.