Reflection of Revision of Rhetorical Analysis

I chose to revise the rhetorical analysis I did about an article written by Amy Tan
for assignment 4. I chose to revise this assignment because of my written works my
rhetorical analysis and summary received the same grade, and I felt that the rhetorical
analysis gave me much more material to work with and improve upon. The first thing I
did to improve my essay was to change the title. My original title was Rhetorical analysis
of Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, this was a poor title because it was not eye catching nor
did it say anything about the content of the essay. The new title I chose is; Amy Tan
sways opinions with conversation technique I feel that this title has much more
personality and reflects the content of my essay. Next re-read the article and then read
over my essay. I did this to improve the overall content of my essay. I wanted to be sure
that my overall point of the essay was still valid and see if there were any new ideas I
could incorporate to my a stronger argument. I first decided that I wanted to place a bit
more focus on developing my idea that Tan uses a conversation technique to persuade
her readers. I had originally called this a storytelling technique but decided conversation
was a better description of how she wrote her essay. I felt that if I wanted this to be a
main focus of the essay I would need to first revise my thesis statement. I decided to
first fix the content of my essay then create a thesis statement that best reflected the
content. One critique I got on the original essay was that I didn’t give enough specific
examples of Tan’s use of this storytelling technique so I went back to Tan’s work to find
some examples I could incorporate in my essay. The first example I added was how she
told the story in first person. I chose to use this example because it demonstrates how
she gives the ready that feeling that she is sitting there and telling you the story in
person rather than the reader reading about two fictional characters. I also added a
quote from the essay in which Amy Tan addresses the reader directly as you. I felt that
this strengthened the argument that Tan was attempting to tell her story as though she
was speaking with her reader one-on-one. I took out a few pieces here and there that I
felt were not strongly supported or irrelevant. I replaced these fragments or sentences
with new content that I felt supported my new theme of my essay. When I felt that I had
revised my essay sufficiently I created my new thesis statement, In her essay Mother
Tongue, Amy Tan tries to give a more positive view on non-native English speakers; she
does this by conversing rather than telling, specifically addressing her audience, and by
using herself and her mother as examples. I decided that these were the three ideas
that I had most strongly supported in my essay and that best reflected my title and
overall goal of the essay. I did a final read through of my essay to do some final touch
ups to be sure that my essay flowed nicely and was readable. In this final read through I
decided that what was originally my second paragraph would make much more sense as
my fourth paragraph so it was grouped with my other paragraphs relating to Tan’s use
of examples.