Homework #3 Amy Tan- Taylor Wisnieski

As i began reading Amy Tan's story Mother Tongue i discovered that most of her writing throughout the story is an open prose form of writing. She writes her thesis in the beginning and sticks with it the whole way through her story. One of her statements are, "I spend a great deal of time thinking about the power of language-the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth."(Tan 4). I believe that she follows this through the whole story and an example of that would be when her mother is not understood by people in the hospital. This evokes an emotion from both her mother and the people working in the hospital, the people working in the hospital are annoyed because they can't understand her broken English and her mother is upset because she cannot receive her test results. I believe that the audience in this story can be everyone, any person can relate to this whether it be the woman from China who can barely speak English or an English professor who can speak proper English. Everyone can relate because everyone has either heard people speak the way Amy Tan's mother does and may have reacted the way some of the people in her story did, or they do speak the way her mother does.  I don't believe that Amy Tan is conforming to the genre conventions of an essay because her paragraphs at the beginning and end of the story. In the beginning she begins talking about her mother's broken English and she ends with talking about her mother's broken English.