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Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” appealed to me the most because I could relate to it so well. It is one of my favorite essays that I have read.
In class, we studied different types of rhetorical strategies, and our instructor taught us to analyze texts for what they do. Our first task was to write a summary of the rhetorical strategies used by the artist in our chosen piece. Writing the “Mother Tongue” summary helped me organize my ideas for the essay and gain insight into how my essay can be structured. I wrote my essay with a certain readership, peer group, and instructor in mind. Since students had already read the essay, I didn’t spend too much time explaining its context and instead concentrated on the writer’s rhetorical techniques. I avoided using literary language and instead used straightforward English that every one of my classmates could comprehend.
One of the most significant insights I had during this phase was learning the potential of rhetorical strategies. These techniques allow the artist to make their audience believe in their creation. I understood that the stronger the rhetorical strategies, the more powerful the art. This prompted me to pick the strongest rhetorical techniques used by Tan to convince her audience for my essay. The context of the essay impacted my writing practices the most during this Phase. I had to learn how to properly analyze Tan’s essay and derive the rhetorical strategies she used to make her argument. I had to go beyond just stating what she said and had to explain the intended effect she had on the readers with her anecdotes and descriptive language.
This phase helped me achieve the Course Learning Outcome by aiding me to “recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures.” After reading her essay, my classmates and I empathize with Tan and her mother because we felt like they, and everyone else in their place, deserved better treatment. I acknowledged the powerful effect that the writer had on the readers by putting us in her shoes. Overall, this assignment led me to realize the importance of rhetorical strategies in all forms of art and I shall use this skill in my arguments in the future.

Rhetorical Analysis of Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”

My intended audience: My Classmates and Instructor

Amy Tan is a Chinese American author whose works frequently examine mother-daughter relationships. Tan’s mother was a Chinese immigrant who struggled to speak English properly. Tan describes how her life was impacted by her mother’s “broken” English in her essay “Mother Tongue.” She explains how she deals with racism and offers her opinions on the subject. In 1990, “The Threepenny Review,” a literary journal, published “Mother Tongue” for the first time. Tan makes the case that a person’s English proficiency does not necessarily indicate their intelligence throughout the essay. She describes her and her mother’s discrimination through anecdotes and detailed language. By establishing her character, appealing to the reader’s emotions, and presenting logical arguments, she convinces the literary experts of her stance.
This essay is written by Tan in a casual style. Despite having a college degree in English and having a successful writing career, the author begins the essay by assuring the reader that she is not an expert in the language but rather just a writer who enjoys it. To introduce the reader to her essay and establish a connection between herself and all of the readers, she chooses this narrative. Despite her limited knowledge of the English language, she wants her audience to appreciate her reasoning and her story. Her credentials would have somewhat hidden her point in this essay. If she had begun the essay by listing her accomplishments, her audience might have taken her argument seriously to support her accomplishments rather than her story.
By doing so, this essay’s goal emphasizes that everyone deserves respect regardless of their level of English skill. Tan analyzes how, as an immigrant child, her use of different grammatical structures of English varies with her surroundings. During one of her book talks where she employed flawless English, she became aware of her switch in accents. She noticed that she had used a different English phrase than usual when she said, “The junction of memory upon imagination.” Around her relatives, she speaks in a more relaxed style of English, using expressions like “Not wasting money that way.” She is underlining the impact her native language has had on the English she uses around her family by bringing up this specific situation. This situation occurs frequently to many immigrant youngsters. They alternate between the normal English they use in public situations and the English they use with their family, which is affected by their native tongues.
Tan uses strong emotion to entice the listener to her point of view. The writer finds it deeply offensive when others refer to her mother’s English as broken or fractured because she feels that it restricts how others view her. According to Tan, you should be aware that my mother’s expressive knowledge of English conceals how much she understands. The author demonstrates that, despite speaking “improper” English, her mother had a high level of knowledge capacity by revealing that she read the Forbes report and listened to the Wall Street Week daily. Tan had to help her mother in public with her English throughout her youth. For her mother to get the services she requires, she had to call pretending to be her mother. Tan mentions one event in which her mother went to the hospital to pick up Tan’s CAT scan. The hospital advised her to schedule a new visit since she claimed to have lost her CAT scan. Despite her worries that she had lost her children and husband to brain tumors, they simply rejected her. They refused to listen to her until the hospital made a call to Tan, the writer reveals, and one of her mother’s daily pastimes is reading the Forbes article. In “excellent” English, the writer described the situation for her mother, who was then instantly apologized to. Tan’s mother did not receive this respect because of her “poor” English. Tan’s expressions of rage and alarm show how passionate she is about this problem. The readers are drawn into her story by her strong emotional writing and are given a sense of the discrimination she experienced. This not only elicits empathy from the audience for the author and her mother but also motivates them to take action to combat the discrimination that immigrants suffer in this nation. Tan also supports her position with logical arguments. She talks about the statistics demonstrating how many Chinese students major in engineering. She explains that the problem is caused by the fact that many teachers discourage their Asian American students from creative writing because of the “broken” English they speak at home. Instead, as was the case with her, math and science are encouraged in these pupils. By expressing this, she wants the audience to consider their activities as educators and whether they have engaged in similar behaviors, knowingly or unconsciously. Tan was motivated to be a writer despite the dissuading influence of her high school teachers, and she graduated college with a bachelor’s degree in English. Even though she had excellent English credentials, she felt the need to demonstrate them in her work by employing difficult words like “That was my mental quandary in its fledgling condition.” Tan brings up this subject to draw attention to Asian Americans who do decide to pursue creative writing jobs and who must constantly demonstrate their English proficiency to make up for their “broken” English.
Tan doesn’t take into account other viewpoints in this essay and instead relies entirely on her own experience because a lot of immigrant children who grow up in similar situations have similar stories to tell. The persons who teach English literature and are experts in the English language make up the intended audience for this essay.
Tan supports her claim that people’s intelligence does not depend on their knowledge of English throughout the entire essay by appealing to credibility, emotive appeals, and logical evidence. She eventually goes full circle and returns to her beginnings. As soon as her mother finished reading her book and offered her the compliment, “So easy to read,” she knew she had accomplished. According to Tan, it ultimately doesn’t matter what society’s standards for English are as long as those who speak a different form of the language, such as her mother, can enjoy her works. She comes to value her mother’s English, which she had previously attempted to denigrate, to find comfort in it and herself.