Essay About Mother Tongue And Amy Tans Essay

Rhetorical Contrast
Essay Preview: Rhetorical Contrast
Report this essay
The art of rhetoric is a literary technique used by writers to persuade readers
of one particular thing or another. In the following rhetorical anaylsis, I will examine
two particular authors attempt to persuade their audiences. The first anaylsis will be of
Amy Tans essay “Mother Tongue”, published in The Three Penny Review in 1990. It
seems to me that Tan uses, what I define as a type of inadvertent rhetoric in her essay.
She effectively persuades her readers simply by telling her story and not intentionally
applying any particular technique. Her story is so saturated with truth that she so easily
and effectively conveys her message and her ability to persude seems to happen so
naturally. In contrast, Min-Zhan Lu, in her essay “From Silence To Words: Writing As
Struggle,” that appeared in the journal College English in 1987, seems to intentionally
use rhetorical persuasion to make her point and seems to fail in her attempt. Although
Tan and Lus essays have a lot in common because the subject matter of both pertain to
cultural languages and the influences these ways of speaking have on individuals, Tans
subtle use of rhetoric naturally produces a very clear and compelling message and Lus
does not.
In “Mother Tongue”, Tan seems to take a very modest approach to telling her
story. She proceeds to convey a pivotal time in her life when she is giving a talk to an
audience, that includes her mother. She is simply talking as she normally would in
similar situations, when she realizes that the language she is using is very different
than the language she uses with her mother. A language “with nominalized forms, past
perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of Standard English that I had learned in
school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.”
(Tan ¶3, 5) She realizes that this type of speaking has “burdened” (Tan ¶3, 5) her. As a
natural progression, Tan realizes and reflects on the times when she was talking to her
mother, in the intimate language they share and discover that, “That was the language that
helped shape the way I saw things, ex­pressed things, made sense of the world.” (Tan ¶7,
9) This realization had a dramatic impact on her life. So, all of this becomes clear to the
reader of “Mother Tongue”, without forced examples, contrived thoughts, or
manipulation by Tan. By simply expressing her story and reflecting on situations that
coincide with her story, with apparent ease, she employs the tools of rhetoric and achieves
the results that a writer would desire in their attempt to persuade their reader. I would
almost say that herexamples are technically counter-rhetorical, because she gives many
accounts of how her mothers language had an apparent negative effect on her life. One
example of that is when she says, “I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up,
my mothers “limited” English limited my perception of her.” (Tan ¶9, 1), “My mother has
long realized the limitations of her English as well.” (Tan ¶10, 1), and “I think my
mothers English almost had an effect on limiting my possi- is bilities in life as well.”
(Tan ¶15, 1) But, what becomes apparent from these simple expressions of personal truth,
is that, in spite of all these many challenging aspects that she experienced due to her
mothers language, Tan still concludes that her life has been enhanced by it. All of this
information that she relays culminates to a point contrary to the evidence, which
ultimately makes her message even stronger. One would think that if her experiences
regarding her mothers language wasntso positive, that her present opinion about it
wouldnt be so positive. This further supports my