Speaking Up: Appealing to Emotion and Ethics 

Intended Audience: Standard English Speakers

Standard English has always been the dominant dialect, and dialects that do not match up to par get thrown away or laughed at. Safwat Saleem and Amy Tan use exorbitant amounts of pathos and ethos in their writing to both relate to their audiences and establish credibility as writers and performers. Saleem uses pathos throughout his TedTalk and portrays it in ways that include dreams, quotes, and loaded diction. He uses humor as his ethos, while also establishing credentials as an animator. Tan uses ethos in the form of personal branding at the very beginning of her essay and pathos in the form of anecdotes and vivid language. Both of these writers use emotion and ethics to persuade their audience to evaluate the concept of normal, how standard English works to enforce it, and how we can work towards a more inclusive version of it. 

Saleem grew up with a stutter that had always made him a little more self-conscious than he had to be. He then grew up to be an animator and would give life to his characters using his own voice which had a Pakistani accent. However, youtube did what youtube does, and comments started to flood in making fun of Saleem’s accent. After pondering whether or not it was worth it to keep producing animations, he decided to overcome the comments and reclaim his own voice via his eloquent TedTalk. 

 Saleem starts off talking about the dreams he had which allowed the audience to connect and sympathize with him. He speaks about this dream where he walks into a room full of people and someone introduces themself and then asks what his name is. He speaks about being frozen in place in this dream, unable to move or speak with everyone staring his way. “Have you forgotten your name?” a child says to him. He never forgot this dream. This dream was the way he kicked off his TedTalk and it allowed for Saleem to work to try and convince his audience to listen to his point through evoking an emotional response. 

Saleem uses pathos again when talking about the negative and hurtful comments that he received after posting a short animation on youtube. This tends to strike a chord in most people as humans have an instinct to protect the underdog. As an audience, sympathy is felt, maybe even empathy, and all of a sudden people are listening better, taking his words to heart as he spills out his own. Pathos is used to easily move his audience and persuade them to respond positively to Saleem’s idea of creating a new normal. 

 He confidently delivers this TedTalk which accentuates the ethos he establishes as people typically appear more credible as their confidence rises. Saleem uses his newly found confidence to draw his audience in and to make them listen.     

Tan is a renowned Asian American author known for The Joy Luck Club and numerous essays, including “Mother Tongue”. She was born in Oakland California but her mother was an immigrant who didn’t speak in perfectly standard English. As she grew up she was forced to help her mother with calls due to her lack of an accent. Her mother would constantly be ignored and discriminated against due to her lack of speaking standard English. 

Tan starts her essay off with the line, “I am not a scholar of English or literature”. Straight off the bat, she tells her audience that she is not going to tell them anything they didn’t already know. This allows the audience to be more susceptible to Tan’s ideas as they find her relatable and trustworthy. This also allows her audience to be more open-minded to Tan’s ideas about language. Throughout Tan’s essay, similar to Saleem, she establishes a theme of creating a new normal in relation to standard English. Through this ethos, Tan creates a safe environment where opinions and problems can be spoken freely without fear of judgment. 

Tan Then moves on to speak about the unfair treatment her mother faced due to the lack of standard English as her dialect. This evokes an emotional response, sympathy, from the audience as Tan has now made them feel a bit sad about the discrimination her mother faces. Sympathy acts as an emotional bond between a set of things. With this bond comes deeper listening, better understanding, and fewer misconceptions. 

Language as an oppressor is not an easy topic to navigate and often can only be understood after having experienced certain things such as discrimination and prejudice. Tan states in her essay that she felt ashamed of her mother’s English and through that, the audience can see the internalized and interpersonal oppression that Tan faced on an everyday basis because of the standards that are in place to this day. Internalized oppression can stem from a lot of things including ideas of inequality, and the desire to be apart of the dominant group. However, one of the biggest rationalizations for internalized oppression is the idea that there is a standard and that that standard is normal. 

Both authors discuss creating a new normal in relation to language. They both discuss the times they were discriminated against either directly or by association and use it to activate the argument that “normal” standards are harmful to the very development and foundation of human beings. Saleem speaks to the fact that “normal” standards have harmed him in ways that include discrimination, hateful comments, and a general lack of self-confidence. Tan speaks to the idea that “normal” standards have hurt her mother through discrimination, and ostracization, and by default involved Tan herself. The idea of normal is imposed on us from the very day we are raped into the world and triggers a sensor in us that forces us to assimilate voluntarily or involuntarily.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.