This essay is the Literacy Narrative that I wrote for my STP ERH-101 class during July. I focused on how literary sponsors in my life and their influences have molded together to form my own personal Literacy. I provided examples of sponsors from my family, my educators, and others who have played essential roles in my life. I followed the prompt well, and the main reason why I lost points was due to grammatical errors.
“Teaching Me How to Speak”
Help received on July 6, 2018, from Mrs. Mattie Smith from 14:00-14:30.
New Parents are predictable. As soon as an infant so much as makes a chirp out of its mouth they rush to the infant store or “Babies R Us” to by books for the babies first words and letters. They shove the content right into the feeble hands of their “pride and joy” and begin the journey of the first credible word in a dictionary to come out of his/her mouth. Months later they are communicating and then making complete sentences, and the road towards literacy can now take place. One of my earliest memories of talking to myself or other people is when my mom’s father was still alive. I was in a golf cart with my grandfather when he stopped at the curb to talk to a neighbor. Being the boy who always wanted to go fast while growing up, became bored quickly and I searched for a way to get my grandfather out of the conversation and into the wind. So, I slowly inched my foot from the passenger side floorboards towards the driving pedals, and I gave the accelerator one quick punch. The Kart violently jerked forward and scared the heck out of everybody. I heard my first curse word, receiving my first physical discipline, and the first time remembering the feeling of being guilty, upset, and emotional. At the end of it all, I remember having to write my first apology letters to both my grandfather and his neighbor. My literacy was created at that very moment by my immature actions, my grandfather, and my mother on that very day. Not only has my family influenced my literacy, my various jobs, social life, and my schooling, of course, are all just as important developmental building blocks that have created my writing. People in my life, from all types of different backgrounds, opinions, and ideas have shaped me into the writer and the English student that I am today.
Deborah Brandt said in her “Sponsors of Literacy” essay that sponsors are “usually richer, more entrenched than the sponsor” (Brandt, 73). This is true. Anyone who has influenced my literacy, from the beginning of my memory to the present, has had a more skillful and versatile literacy than myself. Especially teachers and professors who help or have helped my mind grow and become a better writer. At the beginning of High School, I was not the best writer, and I did not care until it started to matter around halfway through my junior year. I began to realize that colleges wanted students who knew how to write and write well. So, I began to buckle down and the woman who helped me do it was Susan Hughes, my AP 12 Literacy, and English teacher. Her class was a huge influence on what my writing is today. At the beginning of her class, I would only get mostly 4s and the occasional five on her essays that she would assign in class. Around December I began going to her for help, receiving helpful feedback on some of my prior essays, and focusing more on the content of the assignments, I began to get either 5s or 6s for the rest of the school year. She showed me how some of my sentences were not making sense, how certain styles would work for certain prompts of writing, and how semicolons were more for people who know how to use them. Being as observational as I am I also picked up some essential vocabulary in her class as well. She was a short and sweet “old school” southern democrat, who always had to let her students know how smart she was. She would use words that I would constantly have to look up on my phone such as dubious, clinical, and ambiguous. Now I can’t stop saying “It is dubious to me” when I don’t know what an answer is to a question a friend asks me. Another example of how Mrs. Hughes had sponsored my literacy is when she taught our class how to write thank you and sympathy cards at the end of the spring semester. She explained the different context, syntax, and diction that is used between both types of cards. She also told us the difference between the amount of voice that I can put into each one. This small but crucial exercise taught me to know when and how to correctly blend my prior knowledge, family literacy, and professional literacy to perfectly fulfill a certain context through my writing. Teachers from all parts of my past were significant influences on my literacy, but for some reason, I believe that she was the one teacher who helped me create my unique voice that is within my writing.
On top of what I learn at school, the terms, words, and speeches that I receive at home and on the farm are also a big part of what has created my literacy. My family and the others that I love always want to talk with me when I’m around, especially the old folks who don’t know when to stop talking. I learned most of my first words, may the big good or bad, from my parents and their parents who are constantly in and out of my house because they all live only 30 minutes away. I picked up words from books and television shows or movies that they showed me, lectures on how I should or should not treat my brother, and little words that they all mumbled under their breath as they stumped their toe against a chair or accidently hammer their thumb instead of the nail. These words and sentences would either make me look like a genius in front of others, or, when using the wrong words at the wrong time, I would be looked at as a little devil or appear to have a below average IQ. As I grew older I began to see how these influences began to mix into my speech and my writing. On the other side of that, grades were very important to my parents. In elementary school, if we came home with anything lower than a plain “B” or “P”, my mom would line up whoever didn’t have the adequate grades and tan our hides with a wooden spoon until she believed the message was received. In Middle School and High School my parents decided to take a different approach. They began to reward us for good grades instead of disciplining us for bad ones. For every B in a standard class we would receive 10 dollars, and for every A we would receive 20 dollars. If we were taking advanced or AP classes, then a B would be 20 dollars, and an A would be 30 dollars. As soon as I learned of this new reward system I began studying and received all A’s, in various classes, until my junior. Although I can admit that we were spoiled with this system, my parents were huge literary sponsors by both disciplining and rewarding us. Just like Sandra Cisneros’ father who was a big Literacy sponsor in her life. Although her story may not be as light-hearted as mine, the situation still drove her to become as literate as she possibly could be. Cisneros remembered when her father would say “Use this” as he tapped his forehead, “and not these” showing them his hands that were worn with years of hard labor that he endured (Cisneros, 103). But on top of this she constantly had to remind her father “Not seven sons. Six! And one daughter” (Cisneros, 103) because he always believed that she would become a housewife with no need for education. Family, no matter how good or how bad, affect our literacy and how we communicate with the world around us.
The way I create my own literacy is how I combine these two main sponsors in my life. The perfect combination must be met for each different situation. If I am about to go into a job interview, my resumes writing and the context that I will say will have more of a professional, or school type, tone, and grammar as I speak while quietly and assertively putting in soft tones of the literacy from my family into it as well. On the other hand, if I was at a party or reunion of some kind I would want the people to know where my roots come from, but have an equal amount of politeness and intellect at the same time as well. When I am at the lowest extreme of using my professional literacy, I am probably at home with my family and friends, who I don’t have to act smart around because they already know that I am. Just as Victor Villanueva said in his book Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, “that all language is an approximation”(VIllanueva, 126). Villanueva knows exactly what it means to find the certain approximation for each situation. He needs to know how much of his Puerto Rican literacy to mix with his Ph.D in English and author literacy. That is what makes great writers the way that they are. They take from what they have learned from where they are from and what they have learned from their schooling and jobs in order to create the unique writing style that audiences recognize only as their own.
Writers come from all kinds of different family and educational backgrounds. Some have or had a richer family life, while others focused more on their Masters or Doctorates. All writers create their individual approximations of literacy based on the literary sponsors that pushed and influenced them throughout their lives. Robertson, Taczak, and Yancey expressed how “we need to explore the relationship between these differentiations and efficacy (Than the mixtures create): surely some are more efficacious than others”(Robertson, Taczak, and Yancy, 207). This is further supporting Villanueva’s idea about finding the approximation of the mixture of literacies that we learn from our sponsors. Writers are only distributors of their own sponsorship and prior knowledge, with an addition to constructors which add their own ideas and opinions to create literary pieces that inspire and awe their audiences.
Word Count: 1711
Citations
Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” Writing about Writing. Wardle, Downs Pp. 68-99
Cisneros, Sandra. “Only Daughter.” Writing about Writing. Wardle, Downs Pp 101-104
Robertson, Taczak, Yancey. “Notes toward a Theory of Prior Knowledge.” Writing about Writing. Wardle, Downs Pp. 185-207
Villanueva, Victor. “Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color.” Writing about Writing. Wardle, Downs Pp. 116-127