Cedeno Emmanuelli 1

Rodderick Cedeno Emmanuelli

Professor Gardiakos

ENC 1101

29 September 2021

Reading Response Two

Deborah Brandt is a professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison who has done much research on literacy and how it has changed over time.

In the writing of her article “Sponsors of Literacy” my assumption is that Brandt wanted to show

the inequalities of our society when it comes to socioeconomic status and accessibility of

resources to our citizens.

Brandt goes about explaining her claims that things are unequal between members of

society by explaining that differences in socioeconomic status, race, and even gender play a role

in the opportunities available to members of society.

Brandt begins this explanation by presenting two stories, one of Raymond Branch and

one of Dora Lopez. Raymond Branch was born into a white family of high socioeconomic status

with parents that allowed him access to any resources he would need or find useful to succeed

with. He grew up with access to the best sponsors of literacy as he had access to his father’s

technology as a professor at the university he worked at as well as access to the most educated

sponsors the university had to offer in terms of staff. This allowed Branch to pursue a successful

career in learning computer software which eventually led to having private sector clients and

work from the university he attended himself. With access to all these sponsors of literacy
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provided to him by his situation in life he was easily able to be successful as he had all the tools

he needed to do so.

As for Dora Lopez, she was born into a poor working class family who then moved to the

same town where Branch developed all these skills in computer programming. Brandt

emphasizes that even though these two children of the same age lived in the same area, they did

not have access to the same resources. This is emphasized by the lack of resources that Lopez’s

family had compared to Branch’s family. Brandt pointed out that Branch had access to the best

technology, sponsors, and resources while Lopez barely got second hand technology for school,

limited sponsorship in terms of readable content, and less resources to support her family who

had different needs than Branch’s family.

Lopez of course had a harder situation than Branch to thrive in despite living in the same

town and at one point attending the same school. I do believe very strongly that socioeconomic

status affects access to certain opportunities in our society but I do not entirely agree with the

notion that race plays a huge role in this inequality. I say this because even though non-majority

races tend to be in worse socioeconomic status’, it does not mean that a well off non-majority

race can not have access to the same resources as a well off majority race family because of their

race.

Sondra Perl’s article was concerned with research on the writing process of unskilled

writers rather than average to skilled writers. One person Perl observed during this research was

Tony. Tony is a 20 year old ex-Marine who is an unskilled writer attending college. Tony has a

way of writing that is described as recursive, meaning he would often re-read what he wrote after

each sentence and this is something I find myself doing as well but not after each individual

sentence like him. On top of this Tony was observed to talk about his writing which would lead
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to planning and then more writing which is something I also do. I like to start writing and plan

what to write next based off that writing. Tony was also found to make many pauses in extensive

writing as I do because I make my ideas segmented and repetitive to emphasize or clarify my

claims/points. While with his reflexive writing his recursive writing was less prominent and his

sentences were made faster as with my own reflexive writing. I find that writing about your own

true reflection and opinion is much easier as you have a better sense of your thinking process and

arguments when writing. As for revising Tony often edited consistently throughout his paper as I

do and made sure to re-read the questions he was answering as I do after finishing a paper.

Furthermore, Tony’s process of writing left very little space for changes as mine does and that is

why I have trouble changing structures or claims from my already established ones. Tony and I

share many similarities when it comes to writing process and it makes me wonder if I actually

am as good a writer as I think I am.

Works Cited:

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Douglas Downs. Writing about Writing. Available from: Yuzu

Reader, (4th Edition). Macmillan Higher Education, 2019.