Compare and contrast both articles.

Compare and contrast both articles.
This assignment will require you to look at the essays read for class and draw a comparison between two of them.   Prompt: What do these two essays have in common? Choose ONE of the following pairs to compare and contrast: “Mute in an English Only World” by Chang-rae Lee“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan Requirements: You will need to organize the essay with the following elements: An effective introduction that clearly summarizes both essays An effective thesis statement (1-2 sentences) that makes a claim in direct response to the prompt. Come up with 3 main points to support your thesis Write in THIRD PERSON OBJECTIVE, no first or second person, which means to “I”, “we”, ‘you”, “us”, etc. within your essay. 3 body paragraphs organized with clear topic sentences Specific supporting evidence from both essays for each body paragraph At least 6 quotes within the body paragraphs of your essay (3 quotes from each source – 2 quotes per body paragraph). 3 total pages (not including the Works Cited page) Paragraphs organized logically to support the thesis Effective use of transitional words and phrases to connect paragraphs and sentences An effective conclusion reinforces the thesis and points to a larger significance of the essay’s point (i.e. answer the “So What?”). Consistently clear, complete sentences with virtually no sentence-level errors that distract the reader or distort the essay’s meaning. A reader can easily understand the writer’s ideas. A unique title that predicts the topic and main point of your essay MLA format for doc., quotations, and Works Cited page (double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font, 1-inch margins) Essay Structure: I. Opening Paragraph: a. Hook to draw your reader in (quote, rhetorical question, anecdote, or brief story) b. Introduce both essays by title, author, and provide a brief summaryc. Should end with the thesis statement: The thesis statement should clearly state something both essays have in common and include both authors’ names and title of the works you are comparing. II. Body Paragraph 1 a. Topic sentence that lists first point of comparison b. Evidence from BOTH essays (Follow ICE : Introduce, Cite, Explain and practice quote integration) c. Closing sentence III. Body Paragraph 2 a. Topic sentence that lists second point of comparison b. Evidence from BOTH essays (Follow ICE : Introduce, Cite, Explain and practice quote integration) c. Closing sentence IV. Body Paragraph 3 a. Topic sentence that lists third point of comparison b. Evidence from BOTH essays (Follow ICE : Introduce, Cite, Explain and practice quote integration) c. Closing sentence V. Concluding Paragraph a. Restate thesis b. Restate each of your main points in their own sentence c. Answer “so what?” question –> why should readers care? Why is this topic important?
Compare and contrast both articles.
3/3/23, 12:25 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&nbId=3374772&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101& 1/9 Chapter 4: Speaking in Tongues: Does Language Unify or Divide Us?: 4-2 Amy Tan: Mother T ongue Book Title: The New W orld Reader: Thinking and W riting about the Global Community Printed By: Kalani Norman ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning 4-2 Amy Tan: Mother T ongue Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, only two and a half years after her parents emigrated from China to the United States. She was educated at San Jose State University and the University of California at Berkeley and then worked as a reporter and technical writer . Tan is best known as a novelist whose fiction focuses on the conflict in culture between Chinese parents and their Americanized children. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), was highly popular and adapted by Hollywood as a feature film. Tan’ s other novels are The Kitchen God’ s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter ’s Daughter (2001), Saving Fish from Drowning (2006), and The V alley of Amazement (2013). Tan published a nonfiction work, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings , in 2003. Tan’ s complicated relationship with her mother , Daisy, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1999 at the age of eighty-three, is central to much of her fiction. In this essay , published in 1990 in The Threepenny Review , Tan, who has a master ’s degree in linguistics, invokes her mother in exploring the “Englishes” that immigrants employ as they navigate American culture. Before Reading How many “Englishes” do you speak, and what types of English do you speak in various situations? Is the English you speak in the classroom the same as you speak in your home or dormitory? 1 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 3/3/23, 12:25 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&nbId=3374772&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101& 2/9 others. 2 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. 3 Recently, I was made keenly aware of the dif ferent Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club . The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major dif ference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her . I was saying things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus”—a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother. 4 Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother , and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her . We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way .” My husband was with us as well, and he didn’t notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why . It’s because over the twenty years we’ve been together I’ve often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy , a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with. 5 So you’ll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I’ll quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a political 3/3/23, 12:25 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&nbId=3374772&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101& 3/9 gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family’s, Du, and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother ’s family , and one day showed up at my mother ’s wedding to pay his respects. Here’ s what she said in part: 6 “Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like of f the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong—but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn’t look down on him, but didn’t take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way , came only to show respect, don’t stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way . If too important won’t have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn’t see, I heard it. I gone to boy’ s side, they have YMCA dinner . Chinese age I was nineteen.” 7 Y ou should know that my mother ’s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to W all Street Week , converses daily with her stockbroker , and reads all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease—all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother ’s English is perfectly clear , perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery . That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world. 8 Lately , I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” or “fractured” English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited 3/3/23, 12:25 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&nbId=3374772&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101& 4/9 English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited English speaker . 9 I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother ’s “limited” English limited my perception of her . I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say . That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her . 10 My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, “This is Mrs. Tan.” 11 And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly , “Why he don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money .” 12 And then I said in perfect English, “Y es, I’m getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.” 13 Then she began to talk more loudly . “What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, “I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in New York next week.” And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker , and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English. 3/3/23, 12:25 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&nbId=3374772&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101& 5/9 14 We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CA T scan had revealed a month ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CA T scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter . She wouldn’t budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter , me, who spoke in perfect English—lo and behold—we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suf fering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake. 15 I think my mother’s English almost had an ef fect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person’ s developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular , plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SA T. While my English skills were never judged as poor , compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B’ s, sometimes B- pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher . 16 This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer . Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, “Even though Tom was , Mary thought he was .” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was shy , 3/3/23, 12:25 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&nbId=3374772&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101& 6/9 Mary thought he was charming,” with the grammatical structure “even though” limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn’t get answers like, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.” W ell, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that. 17 The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship—for example, “ Sunset is to nightfall as is to .” And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight , bus is to arrival, chills is to fever , yawn is to boring . Well, I could never think that way . I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair , “ sunset is to nightfall ”—and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky , the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words—red, bus, stoplight, boring—just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as saying: “A sunset precedes nightfall” is the same as “a chill precedes a fever.” The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me. 18 I have been thinking about all this lately , about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer , why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys—in fact, just last week—that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as “broken” or “limited.” And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me. 3/3/23, 12:25 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&nbId=3374772&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101& 7/9 19 Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing non-fiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management. 20 But it wasn’t until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at 20 first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here’s an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club , but without this line: “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state.” A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce. 21 Fortunately , for reasons I won’t get into today , I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother , because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind—and in fact she did read my early drafts—I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts. 22 Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: “So easy to read.” Amy T an, “Mother T ongue.” Copyright © 1989. First appeared in The Threepenny Review . Reprinted by permission of the author and the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Thinking about the Essay
Compare and contrast both articles.
3/3/23, 12:24 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101&nbId=3374772& 1/6 Chapter 4: Speaking in Tongues: Does Language Unify or Divide Us?: 4-4 Chang-rae Lee: Mute in an English-Only World Book Title: The New W orld Reader: Thinking and W riting about the Global Community Printed By: Kalani Norman (kala[email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning 4-4 Chang-rae Lee: Mute in an English-Only W orld Chang-rae Lee was born in 1965 in Seoul, South Korea. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1968. Lee attended public schools in New Rochelle, New York; graduated from Yale University (BA, 1987); and received an MF A degree from the University of Oregon (1993). His first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won several prizes, including the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. His other works include A Gesture Life (1999); Aloft (2004); The Surrendered (2010), a finalist for the 201 1 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and On Such a Full Sea (2014). He has also published fiction and nonfiction in many magazines, including The New Yorker and Time . Lee has taught in the creative writing programs at the University of Oregon and Hunter College; today he is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University . In the following essay, which appeared on the op-ed page of The New York T imes in 1996, Lee remembers his mother ’s ef forts to learn English, using literary memoir to comment on recent laws passed by certain towns in New Jersey requiring English on all commercial signs. Before Reading Should all commercial signs have English written on them, in addition to any other language? What about menus in ethnic restaurants? 1 When I read of the troubles in Palisades Park, N.J., over the proliferation of Korean language signs along its main commercial strip, I unexpectedly sympathized with the frustrations, resentments and fears of the longtime residents. They clearly felt alienated and even unwelcome in a vital part of their community. The town, like 3/3/23, 12:24 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101&nbId=3374772& 2/6 seven others in New Jersey, has passed laws requiring that half of any commercial sign in a foreign language be in English. 2 Now I certainly would never tolerate any exclusionary ideas about who could rightfully settle and belong in the town. But having been raised in a Korean immigrant family, I saw every day the exacting price and power of language, especially with my mother , who was an outsider in an English-only world. 3 In the first years we lived in America, my mother could speak only the most basic English, and she often encountered great dif ficulty whenever she went out. 4 We lived in New Rochelle, N.Y ., in the early ‘70s, and most of the local businesses were run by the descendants of immigrants who, generations ago, had come to the suburbs from New York City . Proudly dotting Main Street and North Avenue were Italian pastry and cheese shops, Jewish tailors and cleaners and Polish and German butchers and bakers. If my mother ’s marketing couldn’t wait until the weekend, when my father had free time, she would often hold of f until I came home from school to buy the groceries. 5 Though I was only 6 or 7 years old, she insisted that I go out shopping with her and my younger sister . I mostly loathed the task, partly because it meant I couldn’t spend the afternoon playing catch with my friends but also because I knew our errands would inevitably lead to an awkward scene, and that I would have to speak up to help my mother. 6 I was just learning the language myself, but I was a quick study , as children are with new tongues. I had spent kindergarten in almost complete silence, hearing only the high nasality of my teacher and comprehending little but the cranky wails and cries of my classmates. But soon, seemingly mere months later, I had already become a terrible ham and mimic, and I would crack up my father with impressions of teachers, his friends and even himself. My mother scolded me for aping his speech, and the one time I attempted to make light of hers I rated a roundhouse smack on my bottom. 3/3/23, 12:24 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101&nbId=3374772& 3/6 7 For her, the English language was not very funny . It usually meant trouble and a good dose of shame, and sometimes real hurt. Although she had a good reading knowledge of the language from university classes in South Korea, she had never practiced actual conversation. So in America, she used English flashcards and phrase books and watched television with us kids. And she faithfully carried a pocket workbook illustrated with stick-figure people and compound sentences to be filled in. 8 But none of it seemed to do her much good. Staying mostly at home to care for us, she didn’t have many chances to try out sundry words and phrases. When she did, say, at the window of the post of fice, her readied speech would stall, freeze, sometimes altogether collapse. 9 One day was unusually harrowing. W e ventured downtown in the new Ford Country Squire my father had bought her , an enormous station wagon that seemed as long—and deft—as an ocean liner. We were shopping for a special meal for guests visiting that weekend, and my mother had heard that a particular butcher carried fresh oxtails—which she needed for a traditional soup. 10 We’d never been inside the shop, but my mother would pause before its window , which was always lined with whole hams, crown roasts and ropes of plump handmade sausages. She greatly esteemed the bounty with her eyes, and my sister and I did also, but despite our desirous cries she’d turn us away and instead buy the packaged links at the Finast supermarket, where she felt comfortable looking them over and could easily spot the price. And, of course, not have to talk. 11 But that day she was resolved. The butcher store was crowded, and as we stepped inside the door jingled a welcome. No one seemed to notice. W e waited for some time, and people who entered after us were now being served. Finally , an old woman nudged my mother and waved a little ticket, which we hadn’t taken. W e patiently waited again, until one of the beefy men behind the glass display hollered our number. 12 My mother pulled us forward and began searching the cases, but the oxtails were nowhere to be found. The man, his big arms crossed, sharply said, “Come on, 3/3/23, 12:24 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101&nbId=3374772& 4/6 lady, whaddya want?” This unnerved her, and she somehow blurted the Korean word for oxtail, soggori. 13 The butcher looked as if my mother had put something sour in his mouth, and he glanced back at the lighted board and called the next number . 14 Before I knew it, she had rushed us outside and back in the wagon, which she had double-parked because of the crowd. She was furious, almost vibrating with fear and grief, and I could see she was about to cry. 15 She wanted to go back inside, but now the driver of the car we were blocking wanted to pull out. She was shooing us away. My mother, who had just earned her driver’s license, started furiously working the pedals. But in her haste she must have flooded the engine, for it wouldn’t turn over . The driver started honking and then another car began honking as well, and soon it seemed the entire street was shrieking at us. 16 In the following years, my mother grew steadily more comfortable with English. In Korean, she could be fiery , stern, deeply funny and ironic; in English, just slightly less so. If she was never quite fluent, she gained enough confidence to make herself clearly known to anyone, and particularly to me. 17 Five years ago, she died of cancer , and some months after we buried her I found myself in the driveway of my father’s house, washing her sedan. I liked taking care of her things; it made me feel close to her . While I was cleaning out the glove compartment, I found her pocket English workbook, the one with the silly illustrations. I hadn’t seen it in nearly 20 years. The yellowed pages were brittle and dog-eared. She had fashioned a plain-paper wrapping for it, and I wondered whether she meant to protect the book or hide it. 18 I don’t doubt that she would have appreciated doing the family shopping on the new Broad Avenue of Palisades Park. But I like to think, too, that she would have understood those who now complain about the Korean-only signs. 3/3/23, 12:24 PM Print Preview https://ng.cengage.com/static/nb/ui/evo/index.html?deploymentId=5702061901039166412732460708&eISBN=9781305664401&id=1737447799&snapshotId=3374772&dockAppUid=101&nbId=3374772& 5/6 19 I wonder what these same people would have done if they had seen my mother studying her English workbook—or lost in a store. Would they have nodded gently at her? Would they have lent a kind word? Change-rae Lee, “Mute in an English-Only World,” The New York T imes , April 18, 1996. © 1996. Chang- rae Lee. Used by kind permission of the author . Thinking about the Essay 1. What is the author’s purpose? Is he trying to paint a picture of his mother , describe an aspect of the immigrant experience, convey a thesis, argue a point, or what? Explain your response. 2. What is unusual about Lee’ s introduction? How does his position on the issue raised defy your expectations? 3. Lee offers stories within stories. How are they ordered? Which tale receives greatest development, and why? 4. Lee uses colloquial language in this essay . Identify some examples. What is the effect? 5. What is the dominant impression that you have of Lee’ s mother? How does he bring her to life? Responding in Writing 6. Construct a profile of the writer . What do we learn about Lee? What are his values? What is his attitude toward English? How does this son of immigrant parents establish himself as an authority? How does he surprise us with his perspective on language?