作者：Z.H.
题材：Define Literacy
Genre: This I Believe
A Special Weapon in Modern Time
Literacy is a weapon. I am not saying that literacy brings wars - sometimes it does, but on the contrary, literacy was and is able to serve as a weapon which fights for peace and justice as well - I am saying this mainly to define literacy, and illustrate how it works.
Describing literacy as a weapon is something that I never thought of before, until one time in the writing class, our teacher asked us to portray a picture explaining the relationship between the factors of literacy. After brainstorming, creatively, our group came out with a picture of a spider web, with an owner spider and some flies on it. The spider web stands for different factors that connect to each other and combine to become a whole concept of literacy: the spider stands for the composer of literacy, and the flies stand for the audience themselves who were captured by the masterpiece of literacy. The main idea of the picture makes me start to believe that literacy is something that holds power and aims at different targets - it is a weapon.
However, I used to believe that literacy is still paper and pen only, and I was wrong. When we actually fight a war in modern time, in most cases, we get rid of the old ancient cold weapon like sword and armour; instead, we use guns, tanks, aircrafts, bombs and so on. Therefore, similar to the way development of physical weapons changed the way we fight, our world was having a great revolution of both science and technologies about information in the past decades and made the weapon literacy become not all about paper and pen anymore. When we are making this special weapon, I am not going to say that we are writing, but composing. Because literacy is in the form of multi-mediums, which certainly includes of daily posting on social media that most modern human addicted to, and the songs that go through our headphone every day in the hallway that worth the risks of getting yelled at by the security or teacher.
The precise argument of multi-mediums makes me think of the song that I listen to many times these days, due to its wonderful melody and poetic lines like “your beauty cascaded on me, in this white night fantasy”(Ever Dream, Nightwish). Who can say that a flowing song is not a good weapon of literacy? Every rhythm, note and word in the song is the bullet shooting at the audience, like me. The literacy, as a weapon, is multiple and can be used almost everywhere and in the form of everything.
Moreover, not only songs but also conversation in our daily life shows literacy. Individuals can either fall in love with or ruin a relationship with somebody, just for the way they use literacy. I used to fall for a crocodile for his lovely words through online texting. I believe he conquered me because he is a genius of literacy. When he says, "Ever since I’ve met you, I’ve forgotten all my lines but smirks in my soul.” Even though I knew he didn't actually love me, but what can I do? These bullets were too powerful, I couldn't resist - they went straight through the deepest in my soul, shot my mind away, and made me fall for the composer. After we broke up, I decided to collect those bullets, and to write a novella - and that's another story.
Whoever gets the weapon of literacy successfully, will gain great power that can easily break through the deepest part of human’s mind, and reach his/her purpose. However, as the old saying goes, “nobody can build Rome in a day.” Knowing about the power that literacy carries also helps me realize improving literacy will be a long progress that I need to put more effort in, especially in my new college classes. To shoot at further targets like higher performance in college classes, I need to focus on my persona as a college student, get rid of my old way literacy in high school, and get better guns and better bullets, such as skills of using technologies, critical thinking, open-minded, specific ideas et cetera, in order to aim at my goal of becoming a real college student and getting involve in my new academic community.