This essay was composed much to my dismay. I found it very difficult to remember much of my literacy history and think of the literacy sponsors that meant the most to me. For this essay, I didn’t do a lot of prewriting and drafting, nor did I revise and edit as much as I should have. That caused this essay to go be turned in with a lot of grammar problems and clarity issues. This essay is definitely not as strong as I would’ve liked it to have been, but it has good information and some strong points.
I was born and raised in a small town that most people have probably never heard of named Farmville, Virginia in the county of Prince Edward. Farmville is a small town in the south of Virginia where a lot of people go to get the experience of a small town with a big life. However, the Prince Edward school district is not very good and there is very little emphasis on writing or reading. Luckily for me, there were many people and stories that helped me to become the literacy student that I am today. These are the things that I consider to be my biggest literacy sponsors (Brandt). These people have helped me immensely in getting me to where I am today in life and in my literacy.
The Magic Treehouse was a book series that I was absolutely obsessed with when I was a child and it is one of the only book series that I will say that about. I used to read these books every day and would try to read as fast as possible. I remember this one time I had to read one for a book report and I was so proud when I finished the whole book in one hour. There was never a shortage of those books in the school library or the bookshelves at my house. These books are also the reason that I ever got into writing short stories. Eventually, I got bored and stopped writing them, but I have a vivid memory of enjoying writing those stories while I was still young. I would write short stories of whatever came to mind: superheroes, crushes I had, or my family. This really set the foundation for how I was going to be as a writer for a long time. I even have one amazing memory of a time that a tornado came through my hometown and to calm myself down I wrote a story in one of my superhero notebooks. As I said earlier, my writing education was never really challenged until my junior year of high school and I now have a deep appreciation for this foundation that I set for myself. This is the only time in my life that I believe a book had any influence on my writing, so the rest of my literacy sponsors are teachers or family.
My junior year English teacher Mrs. Womack was an older more traditional lady and believed heavily in the power of writing. Mrs. Womack was one of the weirdest teachers that I’ve had. She was obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. There was a shrine to him in the corner of her room by the whiteboard and she made sure that it was very visible. She would always talk like someone was holding her nose and she would constantly tell us stories about her past. Mrs. Womack also had this annoying intolerance to perfumes and colognes to the point where she would ask you to leave the room if the smell was a little too strong. She was also the only teacher that would willingly volunteer to teach the English class that taught the research paper. At my alma mater Fuqua School, there was almost this feeling of dread when it was time to go into junior year and having to write the research paper. Mrs. Womack started out our year by giving us a book that she wrote on how to write the research paper and told us to start to read it. This book consisted of how to do everything like do bibliography cards to the format of MLA and so much more. Over the next few weeks my class and I spent hours of researching, changing topics, and writing rough drafts. She also made us write bibliography cards that if the smallest mistake were made you would have to redo the card entirely. This was a pain but now I realize it was a necessary pain. This was the very first time that any of the people at my school had been seriously challenged and given the freedom to write a paper on a topic of their choosing. Her strict but wise process of teaching writing is undoubtedly the reason that I understand what needs to be said and I have some knowledge of how to say certain things. However, she is not the only teacher that has had an influence over me.
Dr. Frank was an older man who worked at my high school for about a year and a half and he really came into my life when I joined the debate team junior year. He was very strict and didn’t like it if you broke his rules. He never let you sit on the desks, he always spoke his mind no matter what it was, and he was always fair. I was and still am not a very good debater, however, I decided that I wanted to do debate and do a certain type of debate that was called Congressional debate. Congressional debate is a form of debate that focused more on debating and writing speeches that you would see in a parliamentary situation. Dr. Frank had me write multiple speeches just to practice writing them. Not only did he have me write them he had me practice them in front of the class in order to get more comfortable with them. Sadly Dr. Frank was only my coach for about 3 months because he was fired for reasons that I was not told. Nevertheless, he made an impact in my life while not a big one it helped me progress just a little bit in my education of literacy, and I choose to recognize him as a literacy sponsor in my life. He was very strict about how someone wrote their debate cases which as you can imagine just added to the experiences and the skills that I had already accumulated over the years. He was a huge influence on me even though he was only in my life for a few months, and because he was not in my life for very long I was forced to have to find a new literacy sponsor whether I wanted to or not.
My AP Literature teacher, Ms. Stubbins from my senior year of high school, had my class and me write more than I had ever been required to do before. I always felt like Ms. Stubbins didn’t like me until we went to Europe together on a class trip. I was going to find out soon however that I did not like her class. This class was also where I learned that I do not enjoy having a set prompt and having to write an essay for that prompt in a certain amount of time. But, she would always be willing to stay with you after class to help you if you were having trouble with writing or reading the stories we were reading in class. The reason that I am writing about Ms. Stubbins is because of one time that I was having a really hard time with writing and she decided that my work wasn’t as good as it could be. So, what she did was help me after school every so often and I would write all of my assignments just like she told me to do. This helped me immensely and improved my writing greatly. Ray Bradbury has said that before you can write a novel you should write many short stories. I will admit that I didn’t write multiple short stories, but I wrote a few during this time of being in this class. This is something that I had not done since I was very young, and I seemed to enjoy it. It should be said that while I enjoyed it I wasn’t able to fully express my feelings and thought in my short stories because it had to be on a certain prompt. This is when I really started to improve upon my writing and really started to see an improvement in my grade. I owe a great debt to Ms. Stubbins and I may not be able to pay it off anytime soon, but I will be forever thankful for her. On top of that, I had one more person that has helped me become a better writer in my life.
My father was a straight A student back in high school and went to Hampden-Sydney until his graduation and transition to law school at Wake Forest. So, as you could guess my father is an excellent writer and reader. My father always tried to get me to read and write more by saying “You’re going to need this in college” and “You’ll regret it if you don’t”, but I never believed him until this moment. He even went as far as to make read the book Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. Comparatively, during this past year of writing essays for colleges and scholarships, I always got my father to proofread them before I did anything else with them. But, my father would never tell me exactly what to do, he would only tell me vague pointers such as that one of my paragraphs wasn’t correct or that my entire essay just didn’t flow correctly. While annoying, they did improve upon my writing because he would use his expertise in writing to see what was wrong then make me find it and fix instead of doing it for me. There were many points during the college application process where my father and I would stay up until after midnight and work on my college essays to ensure that they were absolutely what we thought the admissions staff would want to hear. I fully believe that if my father had not helped me those many times and had left me to do it completely on my own I’d probably be a worse writer than I am now, and I would not be here at VMI. Moreover, he taught me something that I would’ve never learned in school, and that is the KISS method or the Keep It Simple Stupid method. He is probably the person that I owe most for helping me expand my education in literacy.
In conclusion, I have had many literacy sponsors that have helped me get to the skill level that I am at right now in writing. My family and my teachers and the books that I read when I was a child all have had an immense influence on me. I appreciate these people more than they can ever understand and I owe them all a debt for getting me this far, and it’s because of a lot of these people and books that I am able to write this paper and go to this college. While I’m sure that there have been other people in my life that have sponsored me in literacy, these were the most important people to me. Furthermore, I look forward to the future and to, hopefully, the many more literacy sponsors that I will meet in my lifetime. (Word Count 1920)
HELP RECEIVED: Faculty Consulatation, Peer review, I talked to fellow classmates to get an idea of what I wanted to write on.
Work Cited
Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy” Wardle and Downs, pp. 68-99
Staff, EasyBib. “The Free Automatic Bibliography Composer.” EasyBib, Chegg, 1 Jan. 2018, www.easybib.com
UCtelevision, director. An Evening With Ray Bradbury 2001. YouTube, YouTube, 1 May 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?
Wardle, Elizabeth and Downs, Doug. Writing About Writing Third Edition. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2017.