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Clayton Campbell
Professor Leslie Wolcott
ENC 1102
8 September 2015
Literacy Narrative
Literacy is ones ability to read and write. The ability to read and write is essential
in everyday life by reading road signs, reading a food menu or just reading a book on
the couch. One can find variations in a persons literacy according to their
socioeconomic status, access ability to resources, or geographic location. When most
are asked to describe their history in reading and writing and they commonly look to
their parents or teachers. But I truly feel that one learns to read or write because they
are ambitious about reaching a goal they have set for themselves. Getting into a college,
having the grades to get a sports scholarship, or anything that they are trying to
accomplish to make themselves better can all result from the drive to perfect ones
literacy and education. This is where they learn to read or write and where their true
literacy sponsors come from.
My literacy sponsor was my baseball coach. I played baseball since the age of
five until my senior year in high school. My goal was to get a division one baseball

scholarship and have at least fifty-percent of my college paid for. This goal was installed
by my baseball coach, he would always say In order to get a scholarship you need to
have a really high GPA, to make yourself more valuable! In this case my coach was my
biggest literacy sponsor due to my ambitious goal of becoming a college baseball player
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once he planted this seed in my head I never turned back. But this coach wasn't just
your regular coach he was a teacher in Entrepreneurship and truly cared about the
grades we had and that we had to maintain a 2.5 unweighted GPA to even be able to
play in a game. With me being so ambitious about getting a baseball scholarship and
getting some of my school aid for. It caused me to become a better student and also
become more articulate and not only would I study hours upon hours but also would
read in my spare time between practice and games. I did this to become smarter and
more knowledgeable about the words I would use and also to sound more intelligent
when I would talk to a college coach. I was also given the resources of having a school
with the grading scale of an A. Which is the best score a school can get and can also
mean they have some of the nicer and better resources that a school in that area can
offer.
When I think of how I became literate I compare myself to Raymond Branch and
how he was given most of the resources and went to a nice school in which He recalled

that his first grade class was hooked up to a mainframe computer at Stanford
University. When I read this I instantly thought about my high school and how we had a
very advanced technology which helped me with trying to not only maintain my GPA at
2.5 but have it surpass that by a whole one point so that college coaches will see me as
more valuable and want me to join their program as well as be one of the best college
athletes that I can be. This shows that when someone is so ambitious about their goal to
get to a certain literacy that they are willing to the end of the earth to complete that goal.
When I read Deborah Brandts story on Dora Lopez and how she wanted to be

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bilingual and was from a lesser background then myself and Raymond Branch, in fact
she had to Dora undertook how to teach herself how to read and write in Spanish.
Dora was so ambitious about being bilingual in order to help her own status out and to
help out her families.
In conclusion peoples ambitions are what push them to become better in what
they maybe and that when it comes to literacy most people need drive to even learn to
read and write. Resources do matter but its mainly the drive you have to become more
literate and be the most well read best writer that you can possibly be. As it was my
coach that gave me my ambitious drive to become more literate and become the most

knowledgable and literate person I can be. So my question to you is What ambition
made you really strive and want to be the most literate you can possibly be? It may open
your eyes on who truly are your literacy sponsors.

Works Cited

Brandt, Deborah. "Sponsors of Literacy." Literacy and Learning:

Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society. San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass, 2009. N. pag. Print.