Thursday, September 15, 2011

Blog #3 Michael Parente


In the reading Mother Tongue I found a new way to look at language. I would say that most of the essay if not all of it was written in the open prose form. The reason why I think this is because I didn’t see a clear thought out thesis, but there was still a focus of the essay and a point that she was trying to get across. The quote “I not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others” (Tan 113). This statement is cool to me because even though she dose not have a degree in English yet she had her own personal definition of literature. I also liked this excerpt “… reads all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease- all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says” (114). This shows that jut because her mother speaks “broken” English doesn’t mean that she is not smart, she reads and understands things that people who speak fluent English don’t understand.

I think that the audience that she is writing to is people who are embarrassed of their background or how they where brought up. Just because someone may not speak the best English or compose the best literature doesn’t mean that they are not intelligent people. Too often in our society people are judged on skin color, dialect, or race.

I feel that this not conform to the genre conventions of an essay. The reason why I believe this is because it seemed to be just a bunch of thoughts thrown together to make an essay. I don’t believe that this is wrong I just feel that it is not the normal essay, it seemed to be more of a story.

1 comment:

  1. i definitely agree with you that this essay was a mixture of open and closed form but is predominately open. Also, i agree that our reading resembled more of a short story than it did an essay. Overall good job:)

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