Brandt, Deborah. Sponsors of Literacy. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 49, No. 2. (May, 1998), pp.

165-185

01/14/13 This article resonated with me because I am a huge believer that peoples socioeconomic backgrounds and current needs generally play a huge role in their development as an individual. Brandt uses the first two peoples stories to explain how these two very different people could end up with opposite terms of literacy, yet somehow be involved with the same institutions. This is due to their different backgrounds and thus different literary sponsors, some obviously being more useful than others. Literacy has become exponentially more crucial to surviving in the past century. Society puts so much pressure on people to be literate in these new ways never seen before. In a world that is forever changing and much more rapidly in the last century, the demands and changing definition of literacy will mirror that same pace. The difficult part is for individuals to keep up. As Brandt put it, literacy is such a valuable commodity, it is almost like land and people will go to great lengths to secure literary sponsors for themselves or whomever they care about. This is particularly evident in the intense competition in college and I think todays definition of literacy for everyone includes at least a college education of some sort. Literary sponsors (or lack of) are an essential part of somebodys development or stagnation and almost purely dictation of that persons future literacy.

Deborah Brandts article Sponsors of Literacy talks about literacy and how different people have become literate in different ways because of different socioeconomic and individual situations. Stating two specific case studies from a set of interviews she conducted to research the topic at hand, Brandt contrasts two people with very different sets of literary sponsors yet they were in the exact same city and involved with the same institutions. She then mentions how literary sponsors have shaped what we call literacy throughout history and gives an example of how it proved true for one man named Dwayne Lowery. From his childhood reading newspapers and his influence from his rubber working union involved father to his twenty plus years working as a union representative, he had to learn and adapt to new ways of words. Brandt ends the article with two more studies on women and how they were affected by other people in their literacy and how literary sponsors have such a great impact on the sponsored.