Written by Gloria Anzaldua, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, is an opinion easy , a retrospection of her past and a story about identity and recognition of a wild tongue. The following is a rhetorical analysis and personal response of this easy . My analysis will be divided into 4 separate parts including intended audience, main claim, purpose and situation.
(a) Intended audience :
The first thing that anyone who even skims through this easy would notice is Anzaldua’s multi-lingual language use. She applies a mixture of English and Spanish along with quotation in both languages . On the first page, she writes “El Anglo con cara de incocente nos arranco la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.” (Anzaldua, 497) This mixing language use can also be seemed in subtitle and quotation. For example, under her subtitle “Overcoming the tradition of silence”, she quotes “ahogadas, escupimos……nos sepulta.” (Anzaldua, 498). It would be logical to conclude that she expects her audience to have some basic understanding about Spanish. Even though, it is not necessary for her viewer to understand Spanish in order to appreciate her work, this multi-language use is an important information to spot her intended audience. In another word, she was not writing to Spanish, Latin American audiences exclusively, but they are her core audiences.
Any other pieces of information carried in her writing is her use of first personal narrative. On page 500, she writes “we collapse two