A response to "Why Heather Can Write"

This is a reading response to an article on literacy titled "Why Heather Can Write". It talks about how kids at a young age are using the world of Harry Potter to read and write fan fiction and improve their literacy to a certain extent.

After reading this article, I was driven to go find some good fan fiction to read. I remember way back in the day when I used to read fan fiction all the time of my favorite game characters and such. Those were good times. However, now-a-days, it is hard to find anything that is worth reading. Half of the stuff out on the internet is either horribly written or “troll-fiction” (fan fiction written by internet trolls, usually highly sexual and tastless). Fortunately, there are some good people still out there writing to their hearts content about the things that they like.

Oddly enough, the subject with the highest quantity and quality fan fiction out there now, I believe, is based around one of the newest sensations among men and women in their late teens and twenties including myself, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. However, as I previously stated, some of the fan fiction is tasteless, but I did manage to find some good titles out there on the World Wide Web. One managed to make me cry, and I was all too surprised to be feeling such heavy emotions from something I found so effortlessly. I have no clue who the person is who wrote that piece of fan fiction, but whoever it was deserves at least a pat on the back or a high five. Similarly stated in the article, the author’s identity is completely unknown. Perhaps it is a boy of 16 living in China or even a woman of 27 in New York. Whatever the case, they wrote something exceptional for an audience such as myself, and maybe even for themselves to escape for a while and bask in the fantasy worlds that surround our culture today.

I believe if a majority of kids began to read and write fan fictions such as this early on in life much like the kids in the article, literacy would be at an all-time high. Who knows, maybe people might have bigger imaginations.