Rhetorical analysis of Amy Tan's 'Mother tongue'

Rhetorical analysis of Amy Tan’s “mother tongue”
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Introduction
Amy Tan, the author of “my mother tongue” was born in 1952 in California. Her mother was a biological nurse while her father was a trained electrical engineer who was also a minister in the Baptist church. She wrote her first essay "What I understand by the term Library" when she was merely eight years old. She was offered a transistor radio as a price for this work, and received publication in the local magazine. Her essay “Mother Tongue” is about her mother’s life, coupled with language inefficiency. Additionally, she points out in this essay that one’s have great influence during the development of his or her language skills. According to her, this was more prevalent in immigrant families.
Thesis statement
Tan’s essay “mother tongue” focuses on the prejudices, which she and her mother encounter for being inefficiency in the English language. However, she presents various arguments in the essay to defend her mother as well as herself with regard to their incompetence in the language. Among the various arguments she presents is that, her mother is an immigrant, and therefore cannot be compared with people who consider English as their first or native language. She also points out that the “simple English’, used by her family members is being adored by them, and they themselves find no problem with it. What matters is that they are able to communicate effectively using that kind of language. According to this, the mother was quite ignorant on her language problem. This aspect in actually sense is resourceful in making the reader/audience aware of the problem as well as the root cause of this problem. This essay reflects Tan’s respect and adoration for her mother though, she had a weakness; she vividly understood her role in defending her. In another angle, this also indicates her writing passion going by the way she has written the story.
Topic Ideas
In her first paragraph, she claims that she is not an English scholar and hence people should not judge her writing in a scholarly way. By this, she wants to make scholars, common people and us a like aware on the existence of such problem on the day-to-day use of language. She indicates that indeed “mother tongue” and normal English has molded her perception of life. The main idea which Tan wants to pass across in this paragraph is that, people who are less eloquent in a particular language should not be considered as less ineptitude. This is observed when she gives herself a...