Amy Tan's Argumentative Essay

3. Tan includes a direct quote from her mother in paragraph six of the reading, and she does not shorten it for an important reason. Tan decides to keep the entire quote instead of paraphrasing to add an effect that a reader can only understand with the full quote. It shows that even though some people speak the language of English it is hard for others to understand based on the person’s full understanding and comprehension of the language. In Tan’s case she is used to the way her mother speaks and uses the language, but to others it is almost impossible to understand. If it were not for Tan summarizing what the quote meant before putting it in the text, few readers would have understood what the mother was trying to convey with her use of the language. Tan’s strategy in including this direct quotation is to show that language differs from person to person even if they all speak the same language. She is implying that the whole world could speak English; however, it would not be the same type of English because of how everyone learns and how others around

them also speak it. This quote allowed readers to see that even though Tan’s mother listens to English and reads it constantly, there is still a difference between her English and others English.
4. Tan criticizes her writing and her own thoughts twice throughout this essay. Once in paragraph three and another time in paragraph twenty. In paragraph three, Tan speaks of how in a speech she gave had been full of nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, and conditional phrases that were burdensome. She uses nominalized forms, a part of speech is used as the noun form. Furthermore, Tan uses past perfect tenses, an action was completed at some point in the past before something else happened. Also, Tan uses conditional phrases in her speech that she wrote and criticizes greatly. Conditional phrases are when the action of a main clause can only happen if a certain condition happens beforehand. These three grammatical phrases in her speech burdened her because she realized that the English she was using in the speech was not the type she used around her mother. Tan came to the realization that not everyone can understand the way she made her speech and it was meaningless with the “carefully wrought grammatical phrases” that she chose to use time and time again when giving speeches to groups of people. The second time Tan criticized herself was in a line that never made it into the real story. It said, “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state.” If a reader were to break the line down it would mean that her thoughts were confusing in the beginning state. Tan calls the line a terrible line that she can barely pronounce. She says this because she realizes that many people will not understand what she is trying to portray without having to look up words in the sentence because of her word choice. The way she originally planned on writing the story would have been too difficult for many readers to understand and that is why she decided that it was a terrible line that needed to be simplified.
5.

Tan divides the essay into three sections as a way to organize her own thoughts. The first section shows the way Tan speaks and makes a small break into how her mother speaks as well. In the second section, Tan furthers her thoughts on “broken” or “limited” English, and how it can be quite confusing to new learners because of what is expected of them to learn. Tan also references to specific times that her mother was treated differently due to lacking “proper” English. In the third break, Tan includes information of what is expected of Asian Americans to be in life, and how they cannot be writers just because that is not expected of them. She includes that she notices on surveys that many Asian Americans go into the math or science field as expected of them. If it were not for these breaks the essay would still make sense and be clear, but it would not seem to be as organized as it is with the three

breaks.