Analysis / Getting Thoughts and Ideas Down
How does Amy Tan persuade her audience? What is Rhetoric? What is the text doing?
Mother Tongue was published in 1990. It is a nonfiction / personal narrative essay.
Audience: I believe her target audience is a wide variety of people. The target audience of this essay is most likely people who have never really put much thought into language, speech, accents discrimination based off language and speech. Her intended audience is people like me who never really knew much about the topic before I read Mother Tongue. On another note, her intended audience could be people who had a similar situation as her growing up.
-The purpose of this essay is to get the reader to understand what it’s like growing up with a parent who speaks “limited” English.
-The purpose of this essay is to make the reader understand why you shouldn’t judge a person based on the way they speak.
It sounds silly and basic, but Amy Tan is really just pushing the classic phrase, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”. If you look beyond Amy Tan’s mother’s “limited” way of speaking, you’ll see an extremely intelligent person thirsty for knowledge. Examples of this include:
- She reads the Forbes report
- Listens to wall street Week
- Has a stock broker
The evidence is supported through her own personal experience with her mother as well as
what she saw her mother experience. In talking about how her mother’s wishes and words were
often discredited, Amy states, “the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at
restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to
I see bits and pieces of ethos pathos and logos used in Mother Tongue. I would choose mainly pathos because Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue leaves an emotional impact on the reader. Amy Tan recalls rather traumatizing and hard experiences that she went through as a child and as an adult. Mother Tongue also uses logos in that the arguments she makes are based on her own memories and things she went through.
This story is all about judgment.
