Your name: 

Guelimanuel Grullon

Completing this worksheet may take more time than you think. It’s worth the time. The information you gather will help you later when writing up assignments. But more importantly, the process of addressing each of the questions below will slowly work to change how you read texts. Keep in mind that some answers will not be obvious or even observable in the text, and so you may have to do some critical thinking and, at times, even some online research. Use full sentences. Take as much space as you need.

Context & Exigence: What topic/conversation is this text responding to? What year is the text published? What is the exigence–that is, what motivating occasion/issue/concern prompted the writing? The motivating occasion could be a current or historical event, a crisis, pending legislation, a recently published alternative view, or another ongoing problem. 

The topic that the text is responding to is to immigrants that came to the US, and to interpret the difference between English and “broken” English. This was published in 1990, which was during a time that the immigration population was booming, so there were a lot of people that were starting to learn English during this time, and knew “broken” English.

Author: Who is the author of this text?  What are the author’s credentials and what is their investment in the issue? 

The author of this text is Amy Tan. She is an American writer, with her parents being immigrants due to trying to escape the Chinese Civil War, and wrote many books. There isn’t any obvious evidence that she has taken any other investment into the issue.

Text: What can you find out about the publication?  What is the genre of the text (e.g., poem, personal essay, essay, news/academic article, blog, a textbook chapter, etc.)? How do the conventions of that genre help determine the depth, complexity, and even appearance of the argument? What information about the publication or source (magazine, newspaper, advocacy Web site) helps explain the writer’s perspective or the structure and style of the argument?

The genre of the text is a personal essay, since it’s not formatted into stanzas, and the other options don’t make too much sense. The author uses many different kinds of words to describe their topic of “broken” English. There’s is no publication that I have discovered that supports or worsens the writer’s perspective.

Audience: Who is the author’s intended audience? What can you infer about the audience (think about beliefs and political association but also age, class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, profession, education, geographic location, religion, etc.)? Look for clues from the text (especially the original publication) to support your inference.

Purpose: What is the author trying to accomplish? To persuade, entertain, inform, educate, call to action, shock? How do you know?

The author is trying to show is to not let people let you down. If you know “broken” English, and once you never learned English, that means you’re improving, and should never be depreciated by whatever people tell you.

Argument: What do you believe is the main claim/idea/argument that the author is trying to communicate? What stance does s/he take? 

The main idea that the author is trying to make is very much believable. Many people throw out their ideas, their beliefs, or their knowledge because 1 person contradicted what they said, or thought their idea was a bad one, or because they didn’t speak “correct” English.

Evidence: How is the argument supported? Types of support include reasons and logical explanations as well as evidence. Types of evidence include anecdotes, examples, hypothetical situations, (expert) testimony, quotes, citing sources, statistics, charts/graphs, research the author or another source conduct, scientific or other facts, general knowledge, historical references, metaphors/analogies, etc. 

The argument is supported because if one person has a great idea to make a book about a certain topic, posts it on social media, and everyone agrees that’ll be a good idea, he’ll have the motivation to the certain book. But if one person says that it’ll be a terrible idea for a book, even though there are a lot of people supporting it, they might just cancel it just because of that one person. If it was a large number of people saying that it’s a bad idea, the author shouldn’t stop anyways if they really want to do it.

Rhetorical Strategies: What aspects of this text stand out for you as a rhetorical reader? In other words, what do you observe about what the author strategically does (consciously or not) in hopes of appealing to their audience? List here as many observations as you can make about what the text does. 

The text does stand out to me. One of the aspects is the real-life stories and examples that they give throughout. It shows how the problem can be related to real-life and a person might relate to whatever they’re saying.

Citation: Add the correct MLA or APA bibliographic entry for this text. Use easybib.com if you prefer.

N/A

Notes: What do you want to remember about this text?

Never let people deter you.