This essay was rather easy for me to write considering that it was about my writing in ERH-101. This paper shows how my writing has gotten better in ERH-101, and how it has made writing in general easier. One problem I had was finding quotes that helped me to fully express my ideas. To get over that I had to make an outline with the quotes on it to make sure I had my thoughts together and I could see what I was going to write.

John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States of America, said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly (Forbes).” My experience with writing before and during college can be described perfectly using this quote, and having that mentality, going to VMI, and knowing that I would have to write more than I ever have before made me nervous. When I first got to VMI, I wasn’t sure what was coming my way, and it felt like I hit a brick wall. The first essay that I wrote was titled, “Writing With No Experience,” and it told my literacy history through the effect of literacy sponsors on my life (Brandt). My second essay was titled “Scouting as a Discourse Community,” and it told of how the Boy Scouts were a discourse community because it fit into the certain set of qualifications of a discourse community as set out by Swales (Swales). Finally, I titled my third essay, “How Depression Affects Men,” and it was written as a research paper using a magazine article and a scholarly article. This paper told of the way that men feel like they must hide their “unmanly” feelings to keep up the appearance of manliness. All of these essays are now the foundation of my writing here at VMI, and this has had a significant effect on my knowledge of writing. I had many problems with my writing before taking ERH-101, and those problems helped me to become a better writer and improved my literacy overall. We only had roughly four weeks to improve upon our literacy, and the problems that I ran into helped push me to become better.

In my first essay, I used a significant number of intensifying words like really, never, always, and very. While in the moment of writing this essay I distinctly remember not even thinking about how these words were unnecessary. They were just words that I thought improved upon the descriptive ability of the words they complemented. For example,“He never let you sit on the desks, [sic] he always spoke his mind no matter what it was, and he was always fair.”(3) Unknown to me at the time, I would get my paper back with a considerable number of marks on my paper circling these words. I considered what had been written on the paper about how I needed to avoid putting so many of these intensifiers in my papers, and decided that I was going to pay more attention to this problem as it arose later on my future papers.  The next time that it was time to write a paper was a few days later, but this time I decided I wasn’t just going to keep this advice in mind, I was going to make a conscious effort to avoid making that simple mistake again. I was able to keep my intensifying words to a minimum which in turn improved how my essay sounded and flowed. Furthermore, in my third essay, there wasn’t a single comment on the final draft that mentioned any overuse of intensifying words. By recognizing the problem that I had with the overuse of intensifying words in my first essay, I was able to fix my mistake on the second and third paper to improve not only my grade but also to broaden my literacy knowledge. However, proving that I could overcome this situation was only the first of a few problems that I needed to address in my writing.

The first essay I wrote had a severe problem with not giving enough specific examples, and the reason was I didn’t have the necessary knowledge or experience to understand how or when to effectively insert specific examples into the essay without disrupting the flow of it. However, as I’ve looked back on them, it was evident that where there wasn’t an example, there should have been one. To give an instance of where I could have used a specific example in my first essay, “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 example describes how most of the descriptions of situations in that first essay were written. When I turned this in it provided me with a lot of chance for improvement. When it came time to begin writing the first draft of our second paper, I remembered the notes that Mrs. Smith had given to me on my final draft of the first essay and I was able to effectively insert those specific examples to make my essay more appealing. For example, “Camping trips are where the idea of helping young men become more familiar and learn how to navigate the outdoors begins to develop in their life.” Using this strategy of inserting specific examples into my paper, my understanding of inserting things into papers without disrupting the flow got immensely better. Moreover, when I wrote the third essay, my examples were even better. For example, “This makes the reader use his logic to understand the importance of the qualitative research toward understanding what needs development.” This further proves my argument that through experience I was able to improve upon my writing problems every time I wrote an essay. Comparatively, this problem had a direct effect on the clarity and cohesiveness of my essays.

Clarity in my first essay was a lot like the problem I had with specific examples. I didn’t have the knowledge to understand how, when, or where to edit my essay to make the ideas of the paragraph and thesis more clear. This caused significant problems for me because I had a tough time understanding what to do even when someone told me how I could improve this problem. During the writing process for the next few essays, this was the one problem that I had to focus the most on because it took the most amount of my cognitive ability to keep my sentences clear and concise. An example of a not so clear sentence from my first essay was, “As I said earlier, my writing education was never really challenged until my junior year of high school and [sic] I now have a deep appreciation for this foundation that I set for myself.” This wasn’t clear because I forgot to adequately explain how the fact that my writing education not being challenged until junior year applied to the paragraph it was in. Furthermore, when it came time to write the second essay, I still had no idea how to improve my clarity problems to their fullest extent. I had a tough time tying my points of how scouting is a discourse community to the thesis. While I still have a significant amount of trouble with this particular aspect of an essay, it did improve even if only by a small amount. This was evident to me when I got my third essay back, and there was only one point that said I needed to clear it up. This problem has most definitely been my most challenging problem to get past, but it has helped me with another problem that I’ve had that has to do with my organization.

The last problem that was prevalent to me in my essays was a problem with my organization. In my first essay, I had a hard time with putting my paragraphs and ideas into a coherent and organized order. This tied into my clarity problems because it directly affected it. If my organization or ideas and paragraphs was not good, then my clarity would be terrible. An instance of when I had organization problems in the first essay was when some of the examples I gave were out of chronological order when I said, “…had my class and me write more than I had ever been required to do before.” However, later I said,” I was going to find out soon however that I did not like her class.” These problems caused my essay not to make sense and caused my grade to go down. Then in my second essay, I had minimal organizational problems. However, I did receive a comment that said since I had introduced an idea in the introduction that I needed to use diction to help the reader connect. Finally, in my third essay, I had no comments on my essay that had to do with my organization. This showed my progress and just further proves my thesis that I have made progress while I have been here at VMI.

As shown above, I have made a lot of progress in my time here at VMI in my writing. My writing experience was nonexistent before VMI, and this class has pushed my writing to its limits. Furthermore, I had no idea that any of these problems that I was having were problems before taking ERH-101. All of these situations had solutions that I had to overcome through experience and a lot of help from other people. Through this class, I know that I will have academic success here at VMI, and my new writing ability will help me achieve success in life. (Word Count 1642)

Help Received: Writing Center, Faculty Consultations, and Peer Reviews.

Work Cited

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy” Writing About Writing, edited by Wardle and Downs, Mcmillan Learning, 2017, pp. 68-99.

Print.

Horton, Andrew. “Writing With No Experience.” Virginia Military Institute. 2018.

Horton, Andrew. “Scouting as a Discourse Community” Virginia Military Institute. 2018.

Horton, Andrew. “Depression in Men.” Virginia Military Institute. 2018.

Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic

and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-32. Print.

Walter, Ekaterina. “30 Powerful Quotes on Failure.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 3 Jan. 2018,

www.forbes.com/sites/ekaterinawalter/2013/12/30/30-powerful-quotes-on-failure/.

 

For this essay, I had to revamp my writing process and include a new process of prewriting. Because I had no experience in the subject I was writing about, a lot of the concepts of the articles were confusing. I had to read my articles and consider what they meant on a deeper level than most other articles and make an outline for what I was going to write. I feel like that one extra step in my prewriting helped my essay to be more clear and helped my thesis to become stronger. Without this extra step, I would not have been able to write this essay or it would’ve been nearly incomprehensible. 

As humans evolve, our standards of societal norms evolve with us. However, a significant amount of the population is still convinced that the old way of society is the best way. Young boys are told that their feelings make them weak and they should keep them to themselves to keep the facade of manliness and strength. But, young girls are taught that their feelings are okay to experience and that they should express these emotions through whatever means they see fit because they don’t need to preserve their manliness. This leads to multiple problems with mental health in men and can even lead to suicide. Chris Athanasiadis, who has been a professor at five different universities and is currently a professor at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), wrote a magazine article for Psychologist that supports these ideals. Furthermore, Sandra Hoy, whom Athanasiadis got his research from, wrote a research paper on this topic for the International Journal of Men’s Health. Through rhetorical analysis, one can see how the author uses different tactics to persuade people to agree with their ideals. Furthermore, they both show differences and comparisons in genre change, language used, use of the appeals of logos and pathos, and audience.

In the article by Sandra Hoy, she uses complex writing strategies and is aiming her paper to be read by people who consider themselves to be scholarly. However, Chris Athanasiadis has written this paper for a magazine which applies to a different audience that may not consider themselves scholars. The comparison of the genres is that they both essentially advocate for the same thing. Both say that they want to help men by drawing attention to the problem of societal norms that prevent men from talking about their feelings. The difference between the articles is that Hoy’s work is a scholarly article, and Athanasiadis’ work is a magazine article. A scholarly article is typically a more trusted and valuable source of researched information, and a magazine article is an article that is written using other people’s research. The effect that this has on the audience is that it makes people assume on the level of intelligence of the article. The scholarly article is a genre that most people would assume scholars and people of higher education would read. While a magazine article is a piece of literature that is written for the common man to read. Moreover, the genre change compliments the next point in this essay of how language affects the audience.

The comparison of the language is that they resemble each other in many ways. There are points where Athanasiadis says, “ Instead, men may attempt to self-manage their depression or express their depression in ways that do not fit with standard diagnostic criteria” (Athanasiadis). Then in Hoy’s scholarly article, she can say something like, “The hypothesis then follows that males are socialized, from a young age, to be less expressive with their emotions and thus are less likely to seek help” (Hoy 203).  The language compares to each other in the diction and how both authors state the important facts. Athanasiadis and Hoy don’t use diction that is too simple and isn’t super complicated. Furthermore, they both state the facts as if they are essential. For example, Hoy says, “If mental health services are to adequately reach and effectively meet the needs of men it is essential that the male perspective on mental health and help-seeking be better understood.” The use of persuasive diction to get the reader’s attention and make them want to do something about this problem shows the expertise of some writers. Comparatively, Athanasiadis says things like “ Perhaps a way to support positive ways of managing depression is by encouraging men to increase their mental health literacy.” Both authors understand the importance of the topic, and they choose to emphasize the crucial facts for the most effect on the audience. Moreover, the use of diction and emphasizing the facts aren’t the only form of persuasion that the authors use.

The use of logos and pathos is frequently used throughout the works of both Athanasiadis and Hoy. Logos is how an author applies reason to a reader’s logic. An example of how Athanasiadis uses logos in his magazine article is, “A suitable starting point to finding appropriate ways to help depressed men is by first trying to understand depressed men’s attitudes to depression.” This quote, in particular, is meant to bring attention to how we as a can get started as a society to help these depressed men and implores a person’s logic to come out and agree with him. An example of logos from Hoy’s scholarly article would be, “The goal of the approach is to represent in reduced form, the complexity revealed through the qualitative research and achieve a greater degree of conceptual development and insight.” This makes the reader use their logic to understand the importance of the qualitative research toward understanding what needs development. Furthermore, pathos is the appeal a writer has on the emotions of the reader. For Athanasiadis he uses this appeal by saying, “Prince Harry’s recent heartfelt reference to his emotional difficulties after the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and his call to men to vocalize their psychological difficulties…” This tries to apply someone’s emotions by relating a famous person’s problems to theirs in an attempt to force them to empathize with another person’s story. When men see these stories, it could motivate them to seek proper help because a man of high power and respect is okay with publicly talking about his depression. Moreover, an example from Hoy’s work is, “Men experience a gender-specific stigma against help-seeking: society is less apt to accept lack of emotional control and perceived weakness from a man than from a woman.” This helps to show men that there is a stigma and that they are not alone. Men who may be reading this could see that there is research on this and that the fact that they feel this “lack of emotional control” is typical in a lot of men. However, the most critical aspect to appeal to is the audience because those are the people that the authors need to convince that this topic is a serious problem.

The audience that both of these authors are attempting to reach are two vastly different ones. Because of the nature of this topic, the authors must write their articles or journals to try to appeal to a specific demographic. Athanasiadis has to write his magazine article to appeal more to the common man and non-scholars, while Hoy has to appeal to a much more scholarly and sophisticated audience. This affects the audience because the authors need to be able to reach these men and show them that it is okay to show emotions. As I stated earlier, Athanasiadis has to appeal to the common man and to do that he uses slightly simpler terms and needs to put the concept of the scholarly article into a way that people who cannot read as well can understand. He does this by saying things like, “Perhaps a way to support positive ways of managing depression is by encouraging men to increase their mental health literacy.” This way he can effectively reach the men that read his article and convince them to seek the help they need. Contrastly, Hoy needed to put her research in more complex language, and she needed to state her findings in a way that a scholarly person would enjoy reading. For example, “ This perspective on gender rejects simplifying notions of gender and masculinity and an overly simplistic focus on the dangers of hegemonic masculinity.” Most men or women that read that won’t fully understand what it is that Hoy is trying to say. This also goes into the credibility of the author. People are more likely to assume that the research is more credible than the magazine article. However, because an average person probably won’t read a scholarly article just for fun, a man will probably trust the magazine article and take the word of the author of the magazine article author if he sees it’s from a credible source.

Finally, both of these pieces of works develop and define multiple concepts of rhetoric in order to get their point across about men’s depression efficiently. Using tactics like genre change, language, appeals, and appealing to audiences helps them to prove further why men have such a hard time with fully expressing themselves and their feelings on depression. Their use of genre change helps them to classify what kind of literary work it is for the audience to determine whether or not it’s worth reading. Language helps to show what they are saying and how important they feel the idea of men’s health problems are. The use of logos and pathos in both essays helps to show men that it’s okay to be thinking this way, and they use public figures to help prove that. The audience they are trying to get to shows that they are thinking about whom they are writing this work for and helps them to get more men and women behind the idea of this problem. This also helps with showing men that when they are feeling depressed that they need to seek professional help. When all of these things come together will help men fight depression, and can even save the lives of thousands of men. (Word Count 1664)

Help Received: Faculty Consultations, Peer Review, Writing Center, I talked with a classmate about thesis ideas.

Works Cited

 

Athanasiadis, Chris. “A Man Got to Do What He Got to Do.” Psychologist, July 2017, pp. 62-64. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=123687932&site=ehost-live.

Hoy, Sandra. “Beyond men behaving badly: A meta-ethnography of men’s perspectives on psychological distress and help seeking.” International Journal of Men’s Health 11.3 (2012).

“Staff Profiles | About Us |.” UCLan – University of Central Lancashire, www.uclan.ac.uk/staff_profiles/chris-athanasiadis.php.

 

This essay is the type of paper that will inform you on how the Boy Scouts of America is a Discourse Community. For this one, I had to use strategies for obtaining information that I had not used before. A good example was interviewing a person that is a prominent person within that discourse community. It is because of this assignment that I realized how effective interviews are,  and how you can get plenty of information for your essay. Without a doubt, it is a strategy that I will be using for my future papers.

The Boy Scouts of America is an organization that teaches young men how to survive in the outdoors as well as survive in everyday life. The Boy Scouts are undoubtedly a discourse community (Swales 215) because they fit into the characteristics of a discourse community perfectly. John Swales laid out six characteristics of a discourse community, but it would take me a significant amount of time to write on all six of them within scouting. They have agreed upon a common set of public goals, they possess one or more genre, they have their own personalized lexis, and they have methods of intercommunication for their members. All of these characteristics describe the Boy Scouts, and they help to shape whom a young scout will become.

My old scoutmaster Patrick Murphy, who has been with the Boy Scouts since he was a scout himself, confirmed that the Boy Scouts’ public goal is “To develop better character in young men so they will succeed in life’s challenges” (Murphy). Anyone will be able to see this in all Boy Scout troops. For example, the Scout Oath tells scouts always to do their best, to keep themselves physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. Furthermore, the Scout Law says that a scout will be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, and reverent (US Scouting Service Project). If this doesn’t show someone that the Boy Scouts are committed to turning young scouts into men with character, then nothing will. Scouting will help you become ready to do anything, anywhere. I was a boy scout for seven years, and I can truthfully say that I learned more about how to live in the real world and the outdoors than any other place in my life. This fact should also be visible to the people outside of scouting because of the weekly meetings and the camping trips they take. During the weekly meetings, the older scouts would help the younger scouts with what is called scouting skills. These are skills that will help scouts on camping trips or help them with their progress toward their next rank. Camping trips are where the idea of helping young men become more familiar and learn how to navigate the outdoors begins to develop in their life. There are many different types of camping trips that a scout can take. Some trips take them out in the woods, or there are ones that have a specific purpose, for instance going to the Marine Corps Museum. On these camping trips, younger scouts will learn many things like how to set up their tent, how to cook food on an open fire, or how to orienteer. In my personal opinion, this is the best aspect of scouting because it gives scouts a chance to hang out with other guys their age. This allows scouts to be themselves and focus solely on themselves and gives them a chance to develop their own character. These things contribute to what my old scoutmaster had stated that scouting helps young men develop more character and it will help them to succeed in life no matter where they end up.

The Boy Scouts are able to achieve their common public goal by recruiting a lot of people of differing races, religions, ethnicities. Through this substantial recruiting campaign, a lot of different genres are required to be brought in to suit every scout’s wants or needs. This makes the scouting organization intricate and flexible. Victoria Marro, who was a student of Elizabeth Wardle at the University of Central Florida, wrote that “… the amount of genres used by a group is dependent on how complex and diverse the group is” (Marro 431). Comparatively, scouting is a complex system of thousands of troops and millions of people. The multiple genres in scouting can be seen mostly through the merit badge system. A merit badge is a badge that a scout gets for doing an amount of work in a workbook as well as any projects or prerequisites. These genres include sports, medicine, survival, aquatics, and education. Some specific examples of merit badges with different genres are the first aid merit badge which fits into the medicine genre or the swimming merit badge which fits into the aquatic genre. By completing and receiving a merit badge, a scout is taking a step toward the process of ranking up as well as broadening their mind to new ideas and hobbies. Moreover, to take it to another level there are other genres of merit badges in the sense that there are regular merit badges and then there are Eagle required merit badges. Regular merit badges are mostly optional, but Eagle required merit badges are merit badges that have a scout has to get in order to finally rank up to the highest rank in scouts, Eagle Scout. There are 12 of these Eagle required merit badges, and a few of them take up to 3 months to complete. A few examples of Eagle-required merit badges are first aid, swimming, personal finance, personal fitness, and many more. These merit badges have also helped to develop certain words that have helped to mold the existence of the Boy Scouts of America as we know it.

The Boy Scouts has created many lexeis over the 108 years its been in existence here in America. Some examples are Totin Chit, Tenderfoot, or Life Scout. Lexis has added to the individualism of the members that call themselves Boy Scouts. As just stated, there are terms like Tenderfoot, which is rank, but there are also JASMs (Junior Assistant Scoutmaster) or an SPL (Senior Patrol Leader). These sorts of examples define how much power someone can hold over someone else. This is important to the quality of life within the troop and to keep people from going crazy and assuming control because they want to. These lexeis hold much power for just being words. I personally experienced this during my time in Boy Scouts because I was Patrol Leader and ASPL (Assistant Senior Patrol Leader). There was one time that I was at a meeting, and there was a kid that would not listen to anyone else in his patrol. I had to come in, and as ASPL it was my responsibility to go to the kid and tell him that he needed to calm down and listen to his patrol leader. As soon as I told him that he needed to calm down, he immediately did and sat down. These lexeis have a significant effect on how the people of troops communicate, but there is a broader communication system in place for the members of any troop.

Communication within scouting is essential because it provides scouts and parents with information that they will need. Most of the time that communication will come in the form of emails, texts, or word of mouth at meetings. In the interview, Mr. Murphy told me that there is a newer program that his troop has started using called Scoutbook (Murphy). This program allows a leader of the troop to send out emails and allows the parents to keep track of the campouts their children are on (Scoutbook). This is beneficial to the upkeep of the scout troops because if the parents and the troop leaders were not to communicate, then the troop would fall apart. The parents of the children would not want to send their children to a scout troop that doesn’t want to communicate with them. Moreover, there is also a way for the people in charge of all of scouts in the country to get in touch with people. They also mostly use emails as well, but there is a magazine that the national leaders of Boy Scouts of America put out for the scouts. This magazine is named Boys Life, and it tells kids what is going on in the Boy Scouts organization nationally, and it also tells them stories about how other scouts all around the country are putting their training to the test. The magazine will tell you about other scouts that saved people from drowning or how they put their first aid experience to the test. This is also another vital form of communication within Boy Scouts because it tells the kids what is happening in their organization, how they can use their skills in the real world, and it makes it exciting for kids to read.

In a final analysis, the Boy Scouts of America organization clearly fits into the qualifications of a discourse community as laid out by Swales. The organization has a common public goal that has been agreed upon, it possesses more than one genre, its own set of lexis, and has methods for intercommunication for its members. The Boy Scouts had a significant influence on my life and who I am today. I experienced all of the amazing examples I talked about, and I was even lucky enough to achieve my Eagle Scout. Without a doubt, I would recommend all young boys to join Boy Scouts and become the best version of themselves. (Word Count 1625)

Help Received: Faculty Consultations, Peer Reviews, Writing Center.

Work Cited

“Boy Scout Oath, Law, Motto and Slogan and the Outdoor Code.” U.S. Scouting Service Project: BSA FAMOUS SCOUTS, 18 Nov. 2017, www.usscouts.org/advance/boyscout/bsoathlaw.asp.

Marro, Victoria. “The Genres of Chi Omega.” Writing About Writing, Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2017, pp. 426-437. Print.

Murphy, Patrick. Telephone interview, 10 Jul. 2018.

Scoutbook. Boy Scouts of America. 2015. https://www.scoutbook.com/

Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-32. Print.

 

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?

v=_W-r7ABrMYU.

Wardle, Elizabeth and Downs, Doug. Writing About Writing Third Edition. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2017.