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AJ Stockwell
Professor Wolcott
ENC 1102
26 January 2015
Literacy Narrative
Throughout our lives, there is one thing that we use every single day from the time we are
able to read and write. That thing is literacy. Literacy can mean different things to different
people, but in its most basic form, literacy is being able to read, write and understand what you
are reading. Other than that basic definition, literacy is open to interpretation. To me, literacy has
always been about challenging my mind. I have had many different reasons for this mentality
being instilled in me, some bigger than others. Looking back at my experiences and knowing my
attitudes now, I am able to attribute certain aspects of my literacy to those things.
I have had many people help my literacy throughout my life, the most influential being
my parents. Anyone or anything that helps someone to further their literacy or to hinder it is
known as a sponsor (Brandt 16). They always pushed me to do more than I was capable of at that
period in time so that I would have to work for things. This applied in all aspects of life but my
literacy was a great example. When I would pick out a new book to start, whether it was for a
project or book report or just to read for my pleasure, they would always tell me to read more
difficult ones. I think that society as a whole can be considered a negative sponsor in this
situation because I would be convinced that I wasnt a skilled enough reader to read something
that difficult. However, most times I listened to them and chose the harder one anyway. There
were definitely times that I would have to read sections of those difficult books multiple times to
understand them, but I think in the long run it undoubtedly helped me become a better reader.

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My dad read books all the time so whenever I saw him reading it inspired me to do so. By the
time I was in middle school I was choosing the more difficult books by myself and challenging
myself to finish them as quickly as possible. Books with four hundred or five hundred pages
became my normal reading material and I was hooked. I would read two or three books a week
because I loved challenging my mind to do so. I imagine this is what Malcolm X felt like when
he was reading in prison and trying to learn everything that he could (2). I never realized that my
parents played such a big role in developing my literacy, but looking back on it I understand that
it was the biggest factor that contributed to my overall literacy.
Another form of sponsorship that I was exposed to was an institutional sponsor. An
institutional sponsor is an institution that guides the literacy of people in it (Brandt 10). The best
memory of an institutional sponsor that I have is my kindergarten class. The school that I went to
for kindergarten had a theory that if you pushed kindergarten children hard enough, they could
perform academic tasks far above their age level. Some things I learned that year were
multiplication, some Spanish and the state capitals for example. As for reading, they had a
system of books that went by colors. Every child started at the same color. These colors
corresponded with the difficulty of the reading. In order to move on to the next color, the child
had to read all of the books of one color to a teacher and then answer questions about the reading
after. I remember loving the challenge of trying to move to the next set of books. I would
constantly nag my teachers to come listen to me read so that I could move on to the next set of
colors before anyone else. This system and school worked as an institutional sponsor and helped
me become passionate about reading even before my parents did.
Today, my literacy is much different than it was then. Now I prefer to challenge myself in
other ways. I enjoy listening to music and trying to find every double meaning or interesting

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combination of words. I also spend a lot of time reading articles or posts on the internet. Some of
my favorite ways to challenge myself are to read articles about sports statistics. Its fun for me to
try to wrap my head around the different calculations used to determine the value of a player. I
rarely read books anymore but recently I have been trying to start reading them again because I
want to have that passion for reading again. I do still try to challenge myself with my literacy, but
the desire is nowhere near how it was when I first began. I hope that one day I can recapture the
feeling that I had when my literacy first began to flourish.

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Works Cited
Brandt, Deborah. Sponsors of Literacy. College Composition and Communication 49.2
(1998): 165-185. Print.
X, Malcolm and Alex Haley.The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
Print.