"Learning to Read" The Autobiography of Malcolm X

           

            In “Learning to Read,” an excerpt from Malcolm X’s autobiography, he talks about the frustrations of not being able to adequately express himself in the letters he wrote to Mohammad during his time in prison. He then takes it upon himself to write down the entire dictionary word for word as a form of a “homemade education.” He shows the exact steps he took to learn to read, to write, and to understand far beyond his eighth grade education.

            To begin his project, Malcolm was flipping through the pages of his dictionary and said, “Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.” This is also something that I found in common with Feross Aboukhadiejeh’s attitude in “How I Learned to Program Computers.” He states, “It doesn’t matter what you build, as long as you pick something and start.” This stands out to me because that is where I get stuck in my writing; I spend so much time in the planning phases that sometimes it’s hard to know just where to begin and to let things flow.

            With our first assignment, I think the best thing for me is to just get started, to start at the beginning and see where it takes me.