How Literacy Has Influenced My Life

Literacy is the ability to read and write and is essential to learning any kind of information. It can not be taught and is much more than simply reading a book or writing words down on a page. Literacy is so diverse and unique to the individual that it is always being influenced by new situations or people you come across throughout life. Identifying the source of your literacy is easier said than done, but the simplest way is to identify your "sponsors". Sponsors is a term coined by Deborah Brandt, in "sponsors of literacy", to mean people or situations in your life that affected and developed your literacy, “Sponsors seemed a fitting term for the figures who turned up most typically in people’s memories of literacy learning” (Brandt, 1998). Personally, most of my "sponsors" were situations that happened at school. Throughout this essay I will be talking about how my literacy has been influenced, and developed, throughout my life.

Like many other first children, my journey through literacy began in the womb. My mom has been reading me bedtime stories from the moment I was conceived, "you were my first child! I wanted to do everything by the books,
At first I never actually read the books but once he started asking questions about the Moby Dick novel on my desk I realized I needed to actually read the books for my plan to work, much to my dismay at the time. After that, I started working my way through our schools "The Beatrix potter collection" and quickly fell in love. I would flip through them everyday after school on the bus ride home, as well as to my mom at bedtime. From that point on I was in love with reading and would read anything from graphic novels 5 or magazines to non-fiction novels or the dictionary (which, in hind sight, was probably what started my love for