Brandt Essay

In Deborah Brandt’s essay “Remembering Writing, Remembering Reading,” the author relates her study of forty Wisconsin residents of various ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Brandt asked the participants questions about their earliest memories of reading and writing, questions that revealed information about “literacy learning as it has occurred across the twentieth century” (Brandt 460). The author ultimately concludes that the processes of learning to read and write, while often connected in school settings, are drastically different, something the author calls the “cultural disassociations of reading and writing” (461).
The patterns Brandt found among her interviewees reveal that the process of learning to read is often a pleasurable experience shared with one’s family, while writing is “remembered as occurring in lonely, secret, or rebellious circumstances” (464). Brandt provides many examples how this pattern plays out in our society—parents encourage reading, yet they shy away from writing or discourage it altogether. Reading has come to be seen as an enjoyable, relaxing activity—a healthy escape—while writing is remembered as a chore to accomplish, such as doing the bills or keeping business records.
Brandt ends her essay by arguing that the cultural disassociations shown through these interviews reveal the need for “a broadening of the scope by which we study literacy practices and the need to understand school-based writing in terms of larger cultural, historical, and economic currents.” Brandt explains that to better understand the situations in which people have come to learn to read and write will serve to help scholars to grasp “what literacy instruction represents to students in the future and how it sometimes, inexplicably, to go awry” (477).
While I find Brandt’s essay very interesting and entertaining, as many of the anecdotes remind me of my own early reading and writing experiences, the passion with which she argues the understanding of these experiences eludes me. I agree with her on the immense importance of these activities, but I feel like researching such a concept would be so tedious and seemingly ineffective that I fail to see the point of this essay aside from entertaining the reader with a vast and sentimental array of childhood experiences.