Through her interviews, Brandt attempts to gather different attitudes and experiences with both reading and writing a wide variety of people in order to discover, not "how people make meaning through reading and writing" but rather "how people make meaning of" them. (pg. 460) Thus, she studies the intricacies of various influencing factors in the learning process, not limited to home or school-based learning, in order to explore how they have acquired their roles in human lives.
I think Brandt summed up the results of her research best when she wrote: "It appears that what gives writing its particular value for people--its usefulness in maintaining material life, withholding experience for private reflection, and resisting conformity and control--are the very qualities that make writing a problematic practice for adults to pass on to children or for children to share easily with adults. Paradoxically, writing remains more invisible than reading, both because of how it is embedded in mundane, workaday concerns and because of how it is surrounded by privacy, secrecy, and suspicion. Consequently, parents and children have fewer ways of seeing, naming, and talking about writing than appears to be the case for reading." (page 473)
While she meandered and repeated her points far too often, she did reveal some interesting tidbits, such as this paradox in which reading and writing do not equate. It makes sense then to say that the reason it is easier to talk about making meaning through reading and writing rather than of is because such perspectives are passed on through traditional child-rearing and educational methods, and thus generationally reinforced to a great degree. Thus, literacy development focuses less on critical, interpretive writing skills, aside from the practicalities, and more on reading as a source of enjoyment and closeness between family members. In my eyes, the former results in personal pleasure, healing, or growth, while the latter provides insight into the previous results.
To be more specific, Brandt brought up a topic particularly interesting to me. She mentioned that the destruction of writing, such as journals and diaries containing personal information, only adds to the inequality of the two subjects. She argues that the sharing of writing validates its production and will help eliminate the paradox she appears to believe is negative and detrimental to the field of writing. By mentioning civil rights activism and otherwise, she seems to want to move the reader to express their emotions and feelings for social change, while still including various tales of the heartwarming connections people generally have forged with reading. She wants to incite positivity in writers, I think, or at least make writing less alienating than she sees it. In her eyes, and many others', written word is both a powerful tool and a source of enjoyment, and she seems to want people to become more aware of this duality so as to validate its place in our society and maintain readership with new-found reverence and respect for the craft she admires. By attempting to understand writing's place and power in our lives, Brandt seems to feel that partaking in this comprehensive study of how we learn can even give us a refreshing new outlook as readers. For the most part, I agree. We always need to step back and become cognizant of our actions and thoughts, and why should reading and writing be exempt? We don't only live through our actions and thoughts, but rather advance through our reevaluation of them and by making any changes we see fit.
My question: What do we think of Brandt's discussion on page 474 of a claim that in literary and expository writing, using "professional models...was actually a way of imposing elitist values and domesticating amateur, popular forms of writing that had flourished in earlier times...[as] a way to curtail or control writing, not necessarily to develop it"? Considering here writing's less positive, lonely, impractical, suspicious reputation...
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