Madison Martin

Reverse Outline
1/17/15
1) Introduce Debora Brandt and the books she has written concerning
literacy
a) The acts of Writers
b) Readers and Texts
c) Literacy in American Lives
d) Literacy and Learning: Reading, Writing, Society
2) Describe what Brandt will do within this piece
a) Idea that literacy is not self-taught, and it comes from other
influences
i) People
ii) Institutions
iii) Circumstances
3) The term Sponsor
a) Brandts explanation for why she believes literary sponsors favor
some pieces of literature over others
i) Twilight series v. Hemingway example
b) Brandts argument for people having some of the same literacy
experiences, and how sponsors in a way choose what people are
exposed to
i) Middle Ages Roman Catholic Church example
c) How literacy sponsors can at times either help or prevent an
individual from becoming literate
4) Joseph Ketts take on a literacy environment
a) Print shops in Antebellum American
i) Small shops served as a place to discuss literacy and have
political discourse
ii) Introduction of the steam press
iii) Rise in unskilled workers due to the Industrial Revolution
iv) Steam press making print more accessible v. ending a specific
literacy sponsorship and potential
5) Literacy Looms (20th century)
a) Consumer desire
b) Integrating corporate markets
c) Deployment of weapons/technology
d) Raw material in mass production of information
6) How the peoples reading and writing skills have became more
centralized around common things
a) Education
b) Employment
c) Civil rights
d) Status

7) Begs the question of how people can cope with the constant change
in generations and the economy and their influences on literacy
8) Defining Sponsor: any agent, 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.
a) Sponsors set the rules from what is accessible and what is not
b) Raising the idea that literacy throughout time has always
required permission
9) Studying sponsors by Americans recalling how they learned to read
or write
a) 100 interviews
b) People born between 1990-80
c) Concept of sponsorship as a way to explore the economies of
literacy and their effects
10)
Sponsors as people according to the interviews:
a) Older relatives
b) Teachers
c) Priests
d) Supervisors
e) Military officers
f) Editors
g) Influential authors
11)
Viewing sponsors as people with power or at a higher standard
than the sponsored
a) They gain from the others
b) Reading and writing became exploitable
c) Beginning of commercial sponsorship
i) Example of little league team wearing the logo of a local
insurance agency on their jerseys
12)
Patron-Client relationships & political power
a) Loaning land, money, protection, and other favors
b) Literacy compared to land as a mean of having power or an edge
on others
13)
Literacy as opportunity and access
a) Comparison between Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez
i) Issues raised: race, gender, status
b) Considering how ones literacy is influenced by several different
factors brought on by different economies
i) Yi Vong example
14)
Literacy as a standard
a) Competition generated between institutions
b) Literacy linked to earning a living and civil rights
c) Dwayne Lowery example
i) Quote from Lowery

ii) Sponsorship for his writing was correlated with the conditions
of the time and the industry
iii) How persons literacy and learning is influenced by the
constant changes they are subject to as an individual
iv) Gap in sponsoring forms called the rising standard of literacy
v) Union based literacy
15)
Sponsorship and appropriation
a) Women as secretaries example (Carol White/Sarah Steele)
b) Desirable reading/writing skills describes as appealing,
motivating, and encouraging
c) Quote from Steele on reading/writing
i) It just changes the way you think
d) Literary history v. pressure to change
e) Ideological hybrids
f) Lead to the understanding of middle-class economic power
16)
Framing those who teach literacy as the brokers between
buyers and sellers
a) Attempt to make buyers more aware and informed
b) Patterns of sponsorship:
i) Stratification
ii) Competition
iii) Reppropriation
c) Ideological pressure of sponsors v. private aspects of the writing
process
17)
Close by saying that teachers are trying to prepare students
with literacy, having in mind that literacy is in pursuit of them.