Reaaseerch And Argumentation

Cesar Lopez

Professor Green

ENG 170.03

3 October 2014

Analyzing Argumentative Essays

To make a solid argumentative essay, the author needs to combine different components that will lead to a good organization and coherence. The most important components needed in this type of essay are a strong thesis statement or main claim, a good topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph, and examples to support the argument. In this essay I will compare and analyze tow argumentative essays of different authors. Gloria Anzaldúa, the author of “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, argues that language is a reason for discrimination. In Gloria Watkins’ essay, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, she argues that society have to change the way poor people are represented in every aspect of life. Anzaldúa uses herself as an example of how language can be a reason for discrimination by describing the things she experienced throughout her live for speaking “Chicano”, her native language. As well as Anzaldúa, Watkins uses her life experience to support her main claim that society have a bad stereotype toward poor people and that it needs to be changed. In the two essays, both authors use their own experiences to support their ideas, and the purpose of this essay is to determine which author used this technique better to make their essays more solid.

The main claim in an essay is an argumentative essay is a sentence that tells the reader the specific subject of the essay. Both essays have a claim of value because the authors try to prove that stereotyping the poor or discriminating for the language is wrong. Anzaldúa’s main claim occurs at the end of the third paragraph when she says “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (Anzaldúa 374). This was said because she was not allowed to speak her native language (Chicano) at her high school. On the other hand, Watkins’ main claim appears in the last paragraph of her essay, and she says that “Constructively changing ways the poor are represented in every aspect of life is one progressive intervention that can challenge everyone to look at the face of poverty and not turn away”(Watkins 437). From the beginning of the essay Watkins talks about how society see the poor and provide examples of moments that she livd. Finally she close the essay with a strong paragraph, which is the main claim, summarizing everything she said.

Giving support to the main claim by providing strong examples is the best way to convince the reader that your point of view is correct. Anzaldúa stars her essay by saying that she would get punished every time she was caught speaking her native language at school. Also she mentioned that one time her professor told her “If you want to be American, speak ‘American’. If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong” (Anzaldúa 374). She also use a statistical in paragraph 381 where she says “ We are 70-80 percent Indian” (Anzaldúa 381). Anzaldúa also incorporates dates to support her claim by saying, “Chicanos after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization, have developed significant differences in the Spanish we speak”, but the majority of the examples that she uses to support her claim are based on personal experiences and mostly her own knowledge.

As I mentioned before, Watkins also mostly uses her personal experience to support her claim, but with a different order. While Anzaldúa’s

...