Unit 1 Reflection

My role for this project was to identify the rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) and how they helped the literary work come together and help the author carry her messages across to the readers. As a starting strategy, I had already fully annotated the text to my understanding to further develop my thoughts and identify as well as analyze these devices.Naturally, I found an abundance of emotional appeals and references that helped her carry, develop and demonstrate the overall themes and claims the author made throughout the work. Pathos was more simple for me to analyze in this text because it tends to show others about her experiences and struggles of being a Latina/Hispanic, I can personally relate to that because I, myself, have been told "tame my tongue" and "speak American" because others prefer I assimilate into their cultures rather than embrace my own and I feel those were some points she was trying to formulate. My challenge for this project was identifying and analyzing the logical appeals which were more challenging for me as reader since the style I read was more open-form and narrative-like and it is tougher for me to express myself using logos, so I definitely looked at this as if I were the author but I still quite could not fully understand ways for me to go in-depth about these appeals, so I guess that is one that I acknowledge about myself, I need to spend time to find techniques that will help me achieve this. Ethos for me was pretty straightforward because its purpose is to demonstrate credibility to the readers and sense of comfort knowing the author is well associated and connected to the topic or question at hand which helps her further develop her claims without readers doubting her. In the presentation, which I was in charge of, I wanted to simply make it accessible and easy to navigate, I broke it into sections which contained similar topics, in case readers are only interested in certain aspects of our responses and ideas about the work and made it aesthetically pleasing while also keeping it professional. I made sure there was no plagiarism present as far as I was concerned and cited the work in MLA format as instructed, my group members and I were happy with the results. Regarding the text, I felt that the writer was helping me understand her position and be in her shoes for once, it also helped that I have been in similar situations as her, one thing that I was shocked about, though, was the fact that she mentioned how other Latino/Hispanics judge each other because of their "tongue" or "tongues" and the fact that she brought that concept to light was a revelation for me so I both was surprised and had a feeling of deja vu when she mentions her experiences and metaphors, which I can personally relate to. Anzaldua showed us, the readers, what it signifies to be in her shoes, her perspective, her culture and also how other perspectives such as foe or ally came into play when deciding she had to be stronger and "overcome the tradition of silence".

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MLA Format: Anzaldúa, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987, p. 2947-2955.