Week 5 Reading Response Redo

In reflecting on Deborah Brandt’s The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, following both my reading of the text and participation in class discussion, the concept and critique of ghostwriting keeps running through my mind. Specifically, I have been considering the economic power dynamics at play within ghostwriter-represented party relationships. Brandt says that, in hiring ghostwriters, “clients lend their status or position to the ghostwriter,” and this authorization “serves both practical and integrity functions for the ghostwriter” (43). In addition to the client conferring power onto the author, the writer, as Brandt also addresses, lends power in literacy skills to the client. Brandt refers to her subjects’ referral to the ghostwriting experience as a having a “puppet quality” or “a producer-director role” (43). However, it is not entirely clear throughout the various description of ghostwriter and ghostwritee relationships if who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer remains consistent. In my own experiences ghostwriting, I can think of a striking example of times both when I as a ghostwriter stood in the position of power and control and also when I wrote as a puppet rather than a puppeteer. I will reflect on those experiences now in an effort to further understand the power dynamics at play in ghostwriter literacy exchanges. Several years ago my family member had to write a number of important petition letters that affected their academic standing. This family member was not in a position of power and had limit experiences with this type of literacy activity. My family decided that I should write the petition letters. In this role as a ghostwriter, I assumed the agency of this specific family member in a way that disenfranchised their authority within our family but enfranchised them outside of the family. In this situation, I, as a ghostwriter, held control. Last year, I interviewed for a job. During the interview, I was told I would be writing in the name of the individual hiring me, and in the name of his boss. In this position, which I did not accept, I, as literacy resource, would have been the lowest rung on the workplace ladder. I was being asked to write—providing exaggerated information—as if I was a person I had never even spoken to or met. Though one position offered me a position of power and the other a position of subordination, in both positions my writing worked to enhance the appearance of other peoples’ literacy skills and in both positions my efforts were never publicly acknowledged. I wonder to what extent this tendency to ghostwrite occurs in non-recognized setting and environments. How can literacy researchers consider this as they methodologically construct their research?