Mother Tongue Rhetorical Techniques in Amy Tan's Thesis

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Mother Tongue

Rhetorical Techniques in Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue"

As anyone who has ever been in an argument can tell you, what you say is often far less important than how you say it. Even in other less-aggressive circumstances, perception is generally far more important than substance -- this is certainly the case when it comes to politics, and often the case in more personal situations and relationships. When it comes to more serious and supposedly more rigorous fields such as literary analysis, philosophy, and social commentary, the playing with subjectivities of individual perception is called rhetoric, and it can occur in addition to or in spite of the factual substance of what is being said. Rhetoric is not necessarily a bad thing, though it can certainly be used to twist the truth and create negative consequences -- it is simply a tool that can be applied to language to make an argument or stance more convincing, and can be used for good purposes as easily as for more nefarious ones. In Amy Tan's brief essay "Mother Tongue," the author uses a variety of rhetorical techniques to convince the reader that while the English spoken by her mother -- and one of the "Englishes" spoken by herself -- may not be correct according to the standards of grammarians and other academes, it is still a valid and vibrant form of the language to those who are able to utilize it.

Tan starts right in with a dose of anadiplosis in her second paragraph: "I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with." The repetition of the word "all" in this manner emphasizes both the word itself and the "all" the she is referring to -- in other words, the "Englishes" that she sees as equally viable languages.

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By grouping these various Englishes together in this emphasized manner, Tan is subtly (or not so subtly) hinting to the reader that the weight of one English should be seen as equal to the weight of another English. In the context of the quoted sentence, every English is equally useful, and every English is also equally a part of Tan's childhood and life experience. By equating the different Englishes with one another, Tan makes it difficult for the reader to discount one without discounting the others, and likewise makes it difficult to elevate or respect one without similarly elevating or respecting the others. Before even describing the English that is the subject of Tan's title, she has implanted in the reader's mind that it is equal to other Englishes.

Parallellism is another rhetorical technique that comes up in Tan's writing wit a fair amount of regularity. In one prominent usage of the technique, the author lists all of….....

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