Discourse

Discourse has many different views. As this is completely true with the articles written by Gee, Swales, and Mirabelli. They all have different insight and different ideas on the topic of what discourse is. Discourse, loosely is where you came from and what you learned on your own. To this I say is plain to see is correct, but the ideas that some of the men had, I believe are wrong.
Gee says you cannot become apart of a different discourse. This may be true with genetics and ethnicity, but i believe he is wrong in a few aspects. He says that no matter what no one can be taught to be a linguist... i believe that anyone can. For example, if a child grows up with an english father and a spanish mother, they will more than likely be bilingual naturally, just cause they grew up with it. But even as a young child, naturally we are trying to understand what is going on so we teach ourselves and learn from our parents words and sentence structure by just hearing it. If a person is not spanish but full english and they wish to learn spanish, they can take classes and buy tapes and eventually learn it. this would all be for self improvement. no one doesn't want to learn. thats part of being a human. so we must have the desire to learn these different discourses. What i believe could be taken from what Gee is saying (not that i agree) is that we are all of no discourse. To him, no one can become a mathemetition or an english person who speaks spanish, or a person who is a history major. we have to have the desire to learn the different discourses before we can say we know different things.
now with john swales, i kind of agree with what he says about the speech and discourse communities. we are just surrounded by all of the kinds of people we want to be surrounded by. in my case, english speaking, athletes, and people with a good sense of humor and know how to have a good time.
in short i think we make our own discourses as life goes on. we chose to learn what we desire to become better at. it is this desire to learn that makes apart of every discourse that we want to be.

(I want to apologize for the uncapitalized and misspelled words. My laptop broke, and the computer in the lab has a difficult shift key, i hope you don't get too upset over this)

Deborah Brant's "Sponsors of Literacy" in a nut shell

Justin Linse

Rhetorical Reading

Zuzu Feder

Writ 101

The Purpose of the “Sponsors of Literacy”

I will show readers evidence for my reading by carefully dissecting Brant’s work in this article. I will show how she goes about telling students about the differences in writing and our past sponsors impact on how we write today as a person. Everyone will have their own interpretations of pieces of literacy, but this will only be my interpretation and I will try and convince my class mates that I have looked into the article enough to find out what she exactly means when writing about “Sponsors of Literacy”.

The article that I chose to do in this Rhetorical Reading paper is “Sponsors of Literacy” by Deborah Brandt. Brandt, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, wrote this article in 1998. The Context of the article “Sponsors of Literacy” by Deborah Brandt is some of the common misconceptions people have with literacy sponsors, and “opens” and “closes” some doors about their aspects. The journal this article appeared in originally was the College Composition and Communication, a writing journal that many prestigious writers go to with their work. The Journal’s Intended audience is the students of Montana State University that bought the book and were reading her article. Also the article Brandt wrote was for the other thousands of people that commonly read the journal this originally appeared in. Or just another person trying to further advance their knowledge of literacy. Brant is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, she has also written many books and a few scholarly research articles about literacy and what literacy is about. The article was written in 1998. The situation Brandt is trying to convey is the tension between people and their literary sponsors. Brant says that literacy is sponsored by people and other various fields that add to the subject. This woman clearly has done her studying and research because she is very experienced in this field.

The conversation of the article is the combination of literacies that make people unique. Everyone has a different writing style and a way of going about writing. It is these things that makes everyone different. No matter what it is, people will have different views and perspectives on a subject. No two people will be exactly the same in anything and this is definitely the same for writing. The millions of books that have been written over the years all are different in one way or another it just depends on the point of view taken. She says that “The field of writing studies has had much to say about individual literacy development”. This means that everyone will have a different writing style and no two pieces of literacy will be alike. An individual’s way of perceiving something is exactly what she is talking about when this point is made. To me she is saying that everyone is on their own to figure out whatever it is that we like to do, and make something look like we were putting our thought and time into a piece.  

The writer is talking about everyone having a different way about going to write a paper, she says everything will have some differences and the readers must understand that it is these differences that make literacy very interesting.

Brant’s motivation is to have us as young writers look back and see who our first “teachers” of writing were. It teaches us to explore our past and shape our future as literary students and maybe someday literary experts. Throughout my personal experiences I have only begun to find out who I am. And I know that in these next 70 or 80 years of my life, my understandings will only grow tenfold and I will, till the day that I die, be learning about literacy and its sponsors.

Deborah Brandt speaks of two women who only by the end of the 20^th century helped literacy become “a permissible feminine activity”. These two women, Carol White and Sarah Steele, were innovators of this time with the stereotypical woman identity of the time turning teacher and avid learners of literacy. These two accounts are meant to “shed light” of the process of teaching and learning these certain arts.

The extent that people go through to find out what is going on in their community and how they can have even a slight effect of what goes down, but at the same time furthering their knowledge of the situation at hand. Dwayne Lowery went from building things to informing people about society. He had to learn how to read and write in a completely different way than he was used to. From a car factory to a representative for public employees, you can imagine the change he had to make. The vocabulary and the paper work and the sophistication was far greater than he had ever experienced before. There is an example in this: “I was sixteen years old before I knew that goddamn Republicans was two words”. Lowry, only after leaving the manufacturing company and getting back out into the world, saw that new papers existed again.

Literacy is available to almost everyone, at least a small amount. It is the people who go above and beyond the call of duty, and really dig deep that actually learn a significant amount about whatever it is that they want to figure out. Everyone has the access, it’s just the people who go after it that excel and accomplish something in life. People can use race, gender, or even financial status either for or against their argument, but in any case if you believe you can’t do something then you will never achieve greatness. There is a story of a boy named Raymond Branch who went after what he wanted and through his work and effort only did he finally become a contributor to society.

I had a teacher in high school who was by far the smartest man I had ever met in my life. He believed that only about ten percent of people in the world were actually contributing to the welfare of society and the other ninety percent of people were just filling up dead space in the world, holding us back from greater achievements. I thought about this and really took it to heart. It makes a ton of sense to me that people who are not going after their dreams are only fooling themselves in the end. Now I’m not saying that he was one hundred percent accurate with his claim, but it does have to come down to two factors: Those that do and those who wait. If you don’t go after something for yourself you will never see what is on the other side of the tunnel. The world is just a mess and your life is wasted and gone. You only have one life to live, so you might as well take some chances and better your situation as a human being. And being part of this race, you should almost be motivated to do so.

Dora Lopez is also a fantastic example in this reading of someone who took the bull by the horns and bettered her situation as a Mexican- American in a predominantly Caucasian nation. I’m not one to be hypocritical, but she really got her stuff together and figured herself out as a person. She went from knowing not much English to teaching herself to read and write, and she soon became a translator, communication for her supervisors, from Spanish to English, back again.

This whole article is about finding who you are as a person and your place in society. Bettering your situation as a human being if you will. I know that through all of this paper that I just wrote, people will have their own interpretations and opinions but that’s just it! That’s the point! Everyone will have their own view on a subject. Whether or not the person will do what they can to further better themselves is up to them, but I know that I’m doing all I can to be as productive a person as possible. This is what I got from Deborah Brand’s article, people can say what they want, but I believe it is a solid summary and explanation for many things that go on in this world we live in today. You have to chase what you believe in; the only person stopping you in the end will be yourself.

Rough Draft and Notes on Brant's "Sponsors of Literacy"

The Context of the article is sponsors of literacy. The journal it appeared in is Debora Brant’s article about the “Sponsors of Literacy”. The Journal’s Intended audience is the students of Montana State University that bought the book and were reading her article. The author is Debora Brant. Brant is an English professor at the university of Wisconsin- Madison, she has also written many books and a few scholarly research articles about literacy and what literacy is about. The article was written in 1998. The situation it was written in describes the tension between people and their literary sponsors.

The conversation of the article is the combination of literacies that make people unique.

She says that “The field of writing studies has had much to say about individual literacy development”. This means that everyone will have a different writing style and no two pieces of literature will be alike.

The writer is talking about everyone having a different way about going to write a paper, she says everything will have some differences and the readers must understand that it is these differences that make literacy very interesting.

Brant’s motivation is to have us as young writers look back and see who our first “teachers” of writing were. It teaches us to explore our past and shape our future as literary students and maybe someday literary experts.

I will show readers evidence for my reading by carefully dissecting Brant’s work in this article. I will show how she goes about telling students about the differences in writing and our past sponsors impact on how we write today as a person. Everyone will have their own interpretations of pieces of literacy, but this will only be my interpretation and I will try and convince my class mates that I have looked into the article enough to find out what she exactly means when writing about “Sponsors of Literacy”.