“I Have A Dream” Analysis

Martin Luther King made an inspirational speech in the year of 1963. His “I Have A Dream” speech was persuasive for several reasons, such as the figurative languages and the rhetorical strategies that he used throughout his speech. One thing that I liked a lot about was his unique use of diction.

To begin with, Dr. King’s word choice shaped the use of pathos in his speech. He talked about the “whirlwinds of revolt” that will continue to “shake” the social structure and living standards of America. The words “whirlwind” and “shake” normally represents violent movements in nature. However, a connotation of these words might be the natural disasters that implies the rebellions by Black people, which will never stop until justice is established in the nation. Together, these words leave an impression that will help the audience understand King’s frustration and determination in earning freedom and equality for everyone. However, the interesting part of this use of word choice is the fact that although King tried to promote peace throughout the entire presentation, he used violent and brutal words to try to convince his audience to join on his side.

In addition, he described America’s bank of justice as “waters” and “mighty stream”. These words have a denotation of flowing liquid. Nevertheless, “waters” and “stream” also symbolize life sources. In the deliverance, King is comparing justice to these phrasings because he is trying to point out that justice is also an essential factor to a high-standard society. In order for the people to live in an advanced and harmonic community, there has to be fairness.

All in all, Martin Luther King’s wording style was very effective because it articulated Dr. King’s thoughts on the kind of community America should have. They gave the audiences a clear image of what kind of dream he was hoping for.

“The Danger of a Single Story” (Extra Credit)

After watching the TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Adichie, I noticed that there is a connection between Adichie’s video and the three personal essays that we read in class. That is because all four of the authors were trying to state a point about the injustice of “privileges”. Whether it is language disability or race discrimination, these are all examples of disadvantages that might affect a person’s entire life. In addition, all of the authors used personal anecdotes to support their main ideas. In the essay, “Go Carolina”, David Sedaris used his experience of having language incapability to give examples of his difficulties for being himself. In Adichie’s video, she also talked about her first day with her university roommate. Her roommate was surprised by her knowledge and modernization because she assumed all Africans are uneducated.

Adichie used ethos in her speech by pointing out the fact that she is an “African”. This showed how a lot of Africans were being treated the way she was seen as by the Americans. In addition, she also used pathos in her personal anecdotes to help her audiences understand how she felt when people told her about their perspectives on Africans. When a student told her that it is “such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in [Adichie’s] novel, Adichie replied in a “fit of mild frustration”.

This video made me realize that a person’s background, race, or nationality can make a huge impact on their first impression from someone else. For instance, Adichie’s university roommate had “felt sorry for [Adichie] before she even saw [her]”. That is because Africa had economic disadvantages, so there are less stories written about Africans, and since most stories written about Africans are about poverty and Africa’s political struggles, most people think of Africans as poor and uneducated people. The fact that the Americans had the privilege to be known for being powerful is based on their economic and political system, which strongly supports the idea that a person’s background can decide how the crowd think of him/her as. Generally, just because Africa has a weak organization in their government, it does not mean that everyone who was born in Africa is raised in poor living conditions. This is what Adichie meant by a “single story”. When people look at a situation through only one perspective, they often see the wrong point of it.

“Go Carolina” Reflection

When I first came to TAS, I had no idea how to speak English. I was in fourth grade, and I could understand, read, and write everything in proper English, but the way I spoke it just never seemed to sound right. That is because I’ve never been in an English-speaking environment before. I transferred to TAS from a public school in Taiwan, so I had no experience in using English as my first language. I’ve always spoke in mandarin with my family and in my old school. I wasn’t confident enough to speak up and I wasn’t comfortable in speaking this language to my friends in TAS.

At first, I would speak to most of my classmates in mandarin since almost everyone could speak mandarin. Then, as time goes on, I realized that I needed to make some changes. Not only is speaking in mandarin going to drag down my grade, it will also stop me from improving my English. The only thing I could do to start fitting into this environment is to push  myself to speak to all of my friends in English no matter what. Every day, I struggled to learn to speak like everyone else, but instead, I got more shy and silent. However, after many months of speaking very few English (and no mandarin at all) to my friends, they started to get used to the way I speak. The conversations didn’t sound awkward anymore, and that’s when I started to improve in my speech skills. I spoke more and more English each day, got rid of my awkward Chinese accents,  and eventually got used to this language.

I can definitely relate to Sedaris’s essay because just like Sedaris, I knew what my problem was in speaking, but I just couldn’t change it. In the essay, the author described his difficulties in pronouncing the letter s. He understood his problem but he couldn’t solve it because of his “lazy tongue”. He began to escape from these struggles by not using words that contain the letter s. In my experience, I also tried to avoid my problem with speaking English by not talking for the whole day. Both of us wanted to solve our problems by running away from them, which only made them worse, but in the end, we both found a different way to overcome these difficulties.

“Aria” Reflection

In the essay, “Aria”, by Richard Rodriguez, the author’s main argument is to point out that bilingual education cause students to have limited knowledge in their private language. That is because once the student is finally able to open up themselves to a new language, they start losing balance between the two languages and start spending less and less time on their family language. In the essay, a great example to prove this is when Rodriguez described the way his family all started to speak English instead of Spanish in order to encourage their kids speak up at school, leaving him no choice but to abandon Spanish-speaking. The thesis statement of the essay is explicit because throughout the entire piece of writing, the author made it clear that he is against bilingual education. He supported this main idea by using pathos to describe the anger that he felt when he had “no place to escape to with Spanish”. In addition, as the family begins to blend into the American society, they become more and more “silent” because the kids would have to repeat their sentences many times before their parent could understand, then the frustrated child would often end the conversation with a “never mind”.

I think that Rodriguez’s essay is effective in supporting his main argument because he used many pathos, direct quotations, personal anecdotes, and comparisons in his writing. For example, he described his emotions changing throughout the essay, from being angry and annoyed by his parents to being comfortable in speaking English and depressed by the fact that he’s drifting away from his family and original language. Moreover, he included quotes from a conversation between his teachers and his parents. The conversation was the turning point in his life that caused his parents to start speaking English to him. Furthermore, he wrote about real life experiences such as seeing foreigners that reminded him of his past. Last but not least, he compared and contrast private and public individuality. Bilingual education helps a person gain his public language and identity, but at the same time, it causes him to lose his private language and identity.

“Mother Tongue” Reflection

In the essay, “Mother Tongue”, by Amy Tan, the author made a point about the difficulties and use of logic in English tests such as analogies. I absolutely agree with her because I’ve always done poorly on these kinds of tests. Like the author, I’ve always thought that the answers on the analogy tests do not make sense and that they never seemed to fit in with my logic. In addition, I also made connections with the different “Englishes” that the author uses. For example, at school, the kind of English that I use with my friends are easy-going and are often spoken in incomplete sentences; the English that I speak to my teachers, however, are more grammatically correct and serious; at home, I speak mostly mandarin to my family but sometimes also a few simple and “beginner-level” words. I find the logos strategy in the essay the most effective because they are based on facts and supported the thesis very well. For example, when the author used percentiles to describe how much her friends understood her mom’s accent, she made it clear that even though she thought that her mom’s “broken” English was natural, her friends didn’t seem to agree.