A Rhetorical Analysis Of Mother Tongue By Amy Tan

The piece of writing I am using for my rhetorical analysis is Mother Tongue by the famous author Amy Tan. Amy Tan is the author of such books as The Joy Luck Club. Mother Tongue was originally published in 1990 by the Sandra Dijsktra Literary Agency. Then was reprinted in Everything is an Argument with readings, by Lunsford, Ruszkiewicz, and Walters. The text book was published by Bedford/ St. Martin’s in 2013. Mother Tongue was originally part of a speech that Amy Tan had given while she participated in a panel entitled,”Englishes: Whose English is it anyway?” in 1989. The author describes in detail how she finds herself using various forms of English, depending on who she is around. She also makes the point on how hard life can be for someone who doesn’t speak good English. She goes into her own historical and cultural background to detail how this came about. Including her stories about impersonating her mother for her mother. I believe the

The first claim showed the variations of the English language and the difficulties one could incur if one did not speak it well.” I was walking down the street and became conscious I was using the English I do with my mother.”(Tan 622) The second claim also backed up the first claim by showing how hard it is to grow up as the child of an immigrant, whose first language was not English. The purpose of her claims was to educate and inform people on her observations and experiences. The author uses a lot of emotional yet comical appeals. Take for example the story where Amy’s mother had her on the phone with a stock broker, telling him off because she spoke better English then her mother (Tan 624). This story is comical