"I am 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.
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with." Amy Tan, Mother Tongue.
In traditional classrooms, students are taught to vary their sentences, begin each with different words or phrases, provide a variety of lengths. A paragraph consists of a topic sentence, at least three supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence (much like the five paragraph essay structure that is championed...for some reason 5 seems to be the magic number of completion). One teacher even had me graph the number of words in my sentences to make sure that the line graph produced either a W or an M ; another had my class diagram complex sentences on the board each day, the result, what looked like a large felled tree branching horizontally across the ground; yet another teacher required that no student in his class ever use a form of the verb "to be" in their papers, on penalty of severe grade reductions. To this day, I can rattle off all of the forms of the verb, am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being, and I avoid has, have, and had as well, since Coach Costley didn't like those either.
My point? Traditional classrooms have created a type of methodology, a calculation, if you will, of how and what to write. There is no right answer, it's all subjective the Math and Science students say, and English teachers respond with what can only be described as a formula. In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan addresses just these types of formulaic approaches to the English language, and frankly, breaks most of them. Her first paragraph is two sentences, the bulk of every sentence in her first two paragraphs begin with the same word, with the exception of one, and that word is the infamous "I" which should never be used in serious analytical writing. Granted, Tan's piece is "creative" in scope, but she, nevertheless, is very serious and very analytical in her treatment of the subject. Granted, she uses a literary device called anaphora, but that is usually employed in poetry. In short, my point is, Amy Tan's language, her sentence structures, her disregard for the "rules" of English discourse, help to undermine and redefine common conceptions of how English "should" signify, "should" mean, and what constitutes "good" writing, mirroring her ideas on the subject which she has taken up.
In addition to her language being perfectly suited to her subject, Tan's anaphora of the word "I" goes beyond merely debunking the "rules" of English composition and also serves to emphasize the subjectivity of English usage. It opens her piece up for extensive reflection! (Just what much of my own writing in this class has been missing.) So...
Prompt: Choose what would normally be thought of as an universal experience, like Tan does with English education and the taking of standardized tests, and using the same anaphora of "I" that Tan employs, write a draft that not only tells your own personal details of that experience, but also which expounds, using the "I", on the speaker's individual thoughts, then and now, about the subject. Granted, in subsequent drafts, and as Tan does after the above quote in her piece, the "I" will probably be greatly cut or revised, but this prompt should leave writers with a great bank of subjective and personal language which can more fully round out a draft which may otherwise be missing the personal reflection we've learned about.
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