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Erin Weidel

Angela Orozco

ENC 1101

11 September 2023

A Literacy Journey: Finding the Answers

Growing up, I was never fond of my English classes. In all honesty, I dreaded having to

go to them. Part of the reason for this is that I always felt as if I was doing something incorrectly.

I never felt like I had the correct answer when it came to writing and multiple-choice

comprehension questions. I was always one of the last people to finish tests and would often ask

more questions in my English classes than my peers to get to the correct answer. Now looking

back on these experiences, I’ve come to terms with my literacy journey, and realized that

everyone has a different path. I’ve found that this is especially true when finding the “right”

answers.

Before I started going to pre-school, my parents were my primary literary sponsors.

Brandt identifies a sponsor of literacy as "any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who

enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy-and gain

advantage by it in some way" (Brandt 166). I believe my parents fit this mold, as they were

responsible for my first words and sentences and helped guide me overall to the process of

speaking English. Sometimes they would read books to me at night before I fell asleep,

sometimes they would give me learning toys, but in all they contributed to the beginning of my

literacy. When I started going to pre-school, I was talking to other younger kids that were the

same age as me at the time, and although I don’t remember exact things I did in pre-school, I can
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only imagine that talking to kids the same age as me enhanced my literacy. In kindergarten, one

thing I specifically remember was how every kindergartener was assigned a fifth-grade reading

buddy. Our reading buddy would pick out an assortment of books and read them with us

individually. From this, I was able to develop more complex reading, speaking, and language

skills for the first time. We were also given weekly homework assignments, an example of one

being where we were given traceable lines of letters and were

asked to write those letters on our own after tracing them. From

this I was also able to develop writing abilities and for the first

time, work on my handwriting and writing practices. In first

grade, I was introduced to assigned reading for the first time.

Every student would take a reading benchmark, and would be

assigned a letter from the alphabet, each letter indicating the

reading level of the student. Looking back on this now, I think it is one of the earliest experiences

where I can remember having a competitive outlook and attitude, which I still hold today. I was

determined to be the highest letter reader and would try to read as much as I could to be the best

at assigned reading in my class. This reading, however, was one of the first things I did that

really boosted my reading comprehension and allowed me to truly understand what language

could do for the first time – create a story.

It was in fourth grade that I first learned how to write a “proper” five-paragraph essay. It

started with the introduction, then three body paragraphs, then a conclusion. We were told that

the introduction had to include your three information points that the body paragraphs would

then be on, and that the conclusion was essentially a summary of the essay we ended up writing.

It was also in fourth grade where I truly discovered my love for math and science. I was keen on
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this structured way of thinking that math provided and reading and writing didn’t. At first, I

thought I would really enjoy the aspect of writing essays since we learned it in a structured way.

However, the hard part for me was knowing that from a single text, multiple different themes can

be interpreted and seen as “correct”. As with math, you always got the same answer from the

same problem, but with English it was like you could “make up” a theme of a text and be correct

if you could back up your theme with reasoning. It took me a long time to come to terms with

this and the idea that, “text and language aren’t static” (Wan 5). Which essentially means that

text and language are different depending on someone’s culture, the experiences they have had,

where they lived, and more. In other words, there is no exact way or structure to write and speak,

and no “perfect” form of a language exists due to these different experiences.

Even though I was able to learn how to read, write, and speak as early as fourth grade, it

wasn’t until high school where I started to truly find and discover my writing identity and the

true importance of it all. I started to write in not only my English class, but in my science classes

for lab reports, my math classes for explanations on answers, and in my history classes for world

events. I eventually found my way into a Spanish class as well, where we not only learned a

completely new language, Spanish, but also the

culture behind it. When Julie Wan was learning

English for the first time, she described how she

felt with it as “extremely self-conscious of my

dictation and how I enunciated” (Wan 3). Learning

Spanish, I realized I had the same experience,

where I was often scared to speak it in public and out loud due to the lack of knowing how to

pronounce each letter in a way that didn’t sound very wrong. However, learning Spanish and this
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struggle taught me how much really could be behind one language, and truly how hard learning a

new language can be. One assignment that I did in my 11 th grade English class was an analysis

on a famous speech. Every student was assigned a different speech, and my speech was “Day of

Infamy” spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt. For this assignment, we had to come up with different

components that were included in the speech that

added to the overall meaning of it. This assignment

truly connected my emotions to writing for one of

the first times, and really made me understand the

importance of writing. The way Franklin D.

Roosevelt was able to give a powerful message

through just a page of writing was really inspiring for me, and really told me that there could in

fact be a “right” answer through words. In this same class, I was also exposed to all different

kinds of novels including “Life of Pi”, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “A Doll’s House”.

All these novels introduced me to new perspectives that really opened my literacy about the

world and made me appreciate the writing and literary access I had. Most of all, all these high

school experiences truly added to my writing identity and values.

As a result of these experiences, I consider myself to be a literal and objective writer. One

who not only appreciates real-life events and the lessons that can be learned from them, but also

likes following order and having “correct” answers. Without these experiences from literary

sponsors and my educational experiences from school, I would never have been able to find a

writing and reading style that I truly liked and wrote in. I also would have never been able to

realize that sometimes there truly isn’t a “correct” answer for reading and sometimes there is.
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Works Cited

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” Wardle and Downs, pp. 68-99. Originally published in
College Composition and Communication, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 165-85.

Commons, Creative. “List of Spanish Words,” Rawpixel,

www.rawpixel.com/image/5946059/free-public-domain-cc0-photo. Accessed 24 Sept.
2023.

“PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT SPEAKING ARMISTICE DAY at ARLINGTON

CEMETERY.” Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, 1935,
www.loc.gov/item/2016883610/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2023.

Wan, Julie. Chinks in My Armor-Reclaiming One’s Voice. Angela Orozco, 2017. Accessed 24
Sept. 2023.

Worksheets, Kindergarten. Handwriting Practice Worksheet. 2017. Kindergarten Worksheets,

https://www.kindergartenworksheets.net/handwriting-practice-worksheets/handwriting-
practice-worksheet-printable.html. Accessed 11 Sept. 2023.