literacy sponsors timeline What is a

(Click on the blue speech bubbles to

literacy
learn more about each point) sponsor?

2022
2016 Philosophy
200X
The Internet class
My parents

2023
2015 2021 Library
5th-grade SAT score volunteering
teacher

(I was having Mic trouble so the voices

will be text to speech)
 My parents
in my early years of life, I (like many others) had my
parents as a literacy sponsor.

Before I entered school my parents taught me

the alphabet and some basic reading/writing
skills. in addition, I picked up several speaking
habits from them.
 Mr. Ogle
my 5th grade teacher Mr. Ogle was a very important literacy
sponsor in my life. he would assign full books like Huckleberry
Finn to finish by the end of the week.

during this class, I also learned language skills due to the

required participation in what was essentially a long-form
history role-play session.

in addition to all this, he would assign 5 paragraph essays

every couple of days that we would then have to peer review.

all in all, his class had a profound impact on my literacy skills,

and he served as a major literacy sponsor.
The Internet
around 6th grade I gained
access to quite possibly the
sponsor that had the greatest
impact on my literacy: the
internet.

using the internet, I began to

incorporate memes and
random references into my
day-to-day speech and
writing.

after this point, my writing

became much less formal than
it was in my 5th grade class.
 Sat score
The next major sponsor that I
encountered was in my junior year of
high school.

I would describe the sponsor as my

desire to get a high SAT score for the
Bright Futures scholarship
requirements.

At this time, I was aiming for at least

1330 on the SAT so I studied "proper"
grammar.

As a result of this my writing became

more structured and I would worry
about grammatical errors frequently.
Philosophy class
although I have forgotten their name my
philosophy teacher from my senior year was
one of my most recent and most important
literacy sponsors.

this class taught me that if you get stuck just

keep writing and you'll find something that
works.

in addition, since the class was about

philosophy the focus was less on using
"proper" grammar and more on expressing
ideas which freed me from the heavily
structured writing style I used before the
course.
Library volunteering
the most recent literacy sponsor I could
think of was my time volunteering at the
Orange County Public Library System.

I worked as something like a test reader, I

would review young adult fiction novels to
check if they were appropriate for the age
range.

while I was there, I read around 30+ novels

over the course of a few months
introducing me to many words I had never
heard before and introducing me to many
new styles of writing which I on occasion
incorporate into my own.
literacy sponsors
In Deborah Brandt’s “Sponsors of Literacy” she defines a literacy sponsor 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".

literacy sponsors are anything that shapes someone’s writing be it teachers,

institutions, or circumstances.

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” Writing about Writing. 4th ed., edited by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs,
Bedford/St Martin’s, 2020, pp. 245-265 .