Hyatt 1

Cole J. Hyatt

Professor William Malcuit

English 102

17 March 2023

Cover Letter

I have never been the best writer nor am I now. I do believe however that I am getting

better at writing. This course has added a new skill to my repertoire, researching. I am far from

perfect, but I seek to increase my ability to research during this course. Researching is far from

easy, but to do such for this course I first had to find a topic. I had to think of things I enjoyed

and found interesting and then after deciding a topic I had to go through a form of trial and error.

I had to see if the topic I wanted to pursue had enough information. To form a research

opinion you need research. This means more recent issues or those that are simply less prominent

will not have the information on the topic required for a paper. I found this to be an interesting

way to view the things I love, seeing how the world values them. The more information on them

the more they are known in the collective consciousness. When doing this form of trial and error

you see what things you value and how important they truly are.

My own values told me what to research and the world had to support that. This was the

new skill I learned. Research is about knowing where and how to look into what is important in

the world and how to advance your beliefs through others' work. This means that we show what

we know and tell others through research and as I cannot conduct research on such a level as the

best authors, I simply use their work to show how I think and why that is the way others should

see it as well.
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My Literacy Sponsor

When I was growing up my mom taught me that school was a game and the best players

got the best grades. I learned quickly that I was bad at the game. Having attention deficit

hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), school was always a challenge for me as sitting down and doing

work was always a challenge. I quickly learned one thing however, I love writing. Writing was

something that was a way to express my thoughts in an easily understood way. Growing up I had

a hard time explaining my thoughts as I was pretty scatterbrained, my dad also has ADHD and as

such could usually follow along to a degree, my mom would usually make me reexplain myself

after I finished a long statement. In elementary school I quickly learned that my writing could be

understood by others. This is when I developed a love for the medium, but because I knew it was

my ideal means of communication I became a perfectionist with my writing. As I stressed about

how I presented my writing. Overtime I became super worried about my writing, but my mother

then would read my writing. My mother is a teacher and a writer and this new writing I was

doing made us communicate better. My mother would then help me edit my writing allowing us

to communicate much easier and making me want to write more. This was my first experience

truly loving writing. My mother promoted my writing and made me want to continue writing.

She operated as my literacy sponsor, an advocate for my writing to increase. My mother helped

promote my literacy for college and helped me become prepared for the future.

A literacy sponsor makes you want to be a better reader and writer. A literacy sponsor

could be a person or an institution or anything in between. We all know that one person that

made us feel like we could conquer any challenge. For me this was my mother. This was due to a

multitude of reasons, but I felt it most when I had to take criticism. When a teacher would give

me harsh criticism I would blame the teacher and say they did not understand, but when that
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same feedback came from my mother I could not do the same thing. I knew that she had my best

interests at heart, I simply had to accept the truth that something was wrong with my writing.

Deborah Brandt’s “Sponsors of Literacy” is an academic paper centering on this idea of a

literacy sponsor and shows how literacy sponsors can help a new reader. Brandt says, “Sponsors

are delivery systems for the economies of literacy, the means by which these forces present

themselves to and through individual learners. They also represent the causes into which

people’s literacy usually gets recruited” (Brandt). Brandt shows that sponsors make learners

learn. My mother made a point to always help me learn and increase my reading ability. She did

this a variety of ways, but one was through cutthroat criticism. This may sound bad saying my

mother was cutthroat when I was in elementary school, but this was more of a way of her telling

me what I could improve on point blank. She would sprinkle in compliments and help me

improve overall, but what was crucial was this criticism. This was one way my mother prepared

me for my future. I know I can take criticism and fix my work instead of how I used to feel

attacked and blame the teacher for any issues they saw.

After I entered high school I met a poor literacy sponsor, my high school history teacher.

In my history class writing was a large part of our grade. Whenever I turned in work I would

receive back a grade and nothing else. She would tell you why you had received that grade if you

spent our study block in her room talking to her. This may seem good on the surface, but in

practice we would go in and she would give you a short spiel as she was bogged down with

students that needed to know how to rewrite the paper for a better grade. This meant that you had

to sacrifice near an hour of time coming to her study block for maybe ten minutes of critique.

Worse than all, she would not tell those who either did not have the time or did not want to waste

their time what they had done wrong. Brandt states, “ Of course, the sponsor can be oblivious to
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or innovative with this ideological burden” (Brandt). This teacher I had falls into the oblivious

category Brandt describes. She did not know that this help she was providing was our fuel to

keep going and keep writing for her. This short meeting that was a sacrifice of other time became

a chore and would fall out of favor most of my classmates not choosing to continue attending her

study block. This meant she now was promoting not literacy, but simply doing just enough to

pass and not learning from what you did.

No writing is perfect, but criticism is what brings that writing to the next level. If you are

learning to play a sport and getting no practice. My mother gave me criticism that was to the

point and valued my time, while my teacher expected me to hunt it down and was satisfied not

helping her students. Brandt tells us a good literacy sponsor is someone who promotes literacy

and learning. This helped me become a better student, by having a good sponsor in my mother.
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Works Cited

Brandt, D. (1991). Sponsors of Literacy. College Composition and Communication,

42(2), 165-185. Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. (2021). National

Writing Project
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Research Proposal

Introduction: Religion has been a mainstay in human life for as long as we have

recorded history. In recent history our world has been enveloped by technology and with

technology came “the media” this ever looming presence of something always watching. These

two meet in an odd way, creating an amalgam of the short term gain of media and the long term

gain of religion. I seek to understand the impact of such media.

Research Question: How does new age media affect the spread and effect of religion?

Review of Literature: “Media, religion and the marketplace in the information economy:

evidence from Singapore” takes a more informational and cynical approach. Seeing religion and

media as a business more than anything else. “Religion and Media: showing the full iceberg”

talks about news and media affecting each other in a corresponding dance. “Religion and Media,

Religious Media, or Media Religion: Theoretical Studies” talks about the barrier between media

and religion and the bridges being formed between the two.

Research Plan: I plan on using the library databases and specifically the database that

has religious documents. I then hope to find sources that show that the media can make religion

lose its purpose and become much more centered on money. I also want to show that not all

religious people are the ones you see on television and that some are not for the bastardization of

the culture they are part of.

Project Timeline and Key Challenges: I need to have collected a good amount of

research by March 3rd for my annotated bibliography. Then I will start to really dig into each

part of my research seeing if my position is wrong or simply unfounded. I will then relook and

see if I can find my final argument on media and religion.

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Working Bibliography

Contreras, Diego. “Religion and Media: Showing the Full Iceberg: A Review of Spiritual News:

Reporting Religion Around the World, Edited by Yoel Cohen.” Church, Communication

Hosseini, S. H. “Religion and Media, Religious Media, or Media Religion: Theoretical Studies.”

Journal of Media and Religion, vol. 7, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 56–69,

Poon, Jessie P. H., et al. “Media, Religion and the Marketplace in the Information Economy:

Evidence from Singapore.” Environment and Planning. A, vol. 44, no. 8, 2012, pp.
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Annotated Bibliography

Issue Overview

Religion has existed for almost as long as humans, but recently it has faced a dilemma

with mass media and how to wield it for religion. Religious people disagree about whether or not

mass media can be used for religion or if it is responsible to do so. The real question is is it safe

to use media as a way to spread religion and does it keep the message the religion wants to

spread.

Citations

Contreras, Diego. “Religion and Media: Showing the Full Iceberg: A Review of Spiritual News:

Reporting Religion Around the World, Edited by Yoel Cohen.” Church, Communication

and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 2019, pp. 235–37.

The author breaks down how people view religion used by the media into two categories.

The first is a functionalist, a functionalist is one who views media as an unproblematic

tool or simply a means to an end. The second is an essentialist, essentialists see religion

as its own sovereign identity and history, this makes them weary of using media as it is

combining the history of pop culture with religion. The author delves deeper into looking

at how these relationships with the media inform religion. It works as a great baseline,

basically helping to explain how religious people see media then moving on and seeing

how that relationship affects the folks consuming the religious media.

Miller, A. R. (2015). Negotiating religious identity and mass media: Examining the relationship

among lived religion, mass media, and narrative identity.

Miller talks about how religion is spread throughout the media and how that relationship

is put forth by religious peoples. It focuses on mainly how some religious people see
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mass media as a way of spreading disinformation or generally as a bad thing. It also

shows the other side of the argument of seeing other people showing how it can be a

good way to spread information. This works as a fantastic split argument and helps

support both sides and will help with my counterclaim as well as show an abundance of

information on my side of the argument.

Park, J. K. (2006). Media, religion, and culture in contemporary korea: Production and

reception of religious symbolism in a daily TV serial.

This book shows how religion that is spread through media can be spread and how it is

when supported completely by a culture. Korea works as a microcosm for the world and

how it is that information can be spread or changed slightly. This issue was interesting

and will help as in the United States we see a separation of church and state and the

difference in Korea helps see how around the world we see different ways of the spread

of religion.

Hosseini, S. H. “Religion and Media, Religious Media, or Media Religion: Theoretical Studies.”

Journal of Media and Religion, vol. 7, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 56–69,

https://doi.org/10.1080/15348420701838350.

This article denotes the two varieties of religious people and how they view religious

media. You have either those who see it as simply another tool and those who see it as

easily corruptible and that it loses the essence of connection that religion normally relies

on. The second group simply believes that the media and religion’s connection should be

limited, while the former sees that because of their noble cause it will not be tainted. We

also get to see how the connection and interactivity plays as well.

Poon, Jessie P. H., et al. “Media, Religion and the Marketplace in the Information Economy:
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Evidence from Singapore.” Environment and Planning. A, vol. 44, no. 8, 2012, pp. 1969–

85, https://doi.org/10.1068/a44272.

This is another look into how a country outside the US views these coming together, but

this focuses on an information economy. I do not believe this will help a lot in my paper,

but it helps me understand how other countries may view the two mixing and how we in

the US differ from that viewpoint. Overall religion and media mix in an odd way in our

very capitalist society so other cultures are key to seeing if we are doing it right.