The Message: Language can change the way you live your life.

Language helps shape

you as a person and can change the closeness you feel with your family and friends.
Intended Audience: Families who speak a different first language. Families who are
bilingual, the family in this story spoke Spanish as their first language.
Ethos: Richardss credibility comes from how he saw first hand how growing up in a
household that speaks one language while everyone around you speaks a different
language can eliminate the intimacy you feel for the people you care about. Richard
experiences how having to change the way his family speaks to each other can affect
your relationships and the intimacy in the words spoken.
Logos: Richards reasoning behind the fact that growing up speaking a different
language can affect the way you interact with others is confirmed by his own
personal experience showing that that is in fact true. Richard was not able to
commutate well with others while at school in English since he was used to speaking
Spanish at home.
Pathos: Richard expresses different emotions throughout this piece by the way he
describes language. He describes language as sound, and talks about how him and
his family used to be loud and would have fun at the dinner table but then once they
decided to change from speaking Spanish to speaking English that completely
changed. This made me feel emotion for him because his family and him had a tight
bond speaking their native language then society made them begin to speak to each
other in a foreign language which affected the connection Richard felt towards them
because he stopped hearing the different sounds in words and stopped hearing the
intimacy in the way they spoke to each other.
Overall Analysis: The overall analysis of this story is that changing the way families
speak to each other and interact with each other can affect the intimacy felt for one
another. Richard had to learn how to speak English because that is what the society
spoke; he had to learn how to communicate with classmates and teachers. But
because of this it affected the closeness him and his family had once had with each
other. I feel like this writing is factual because of the way he uses personal
experience to help describe what changing someones native language can do to the
relationship between families. Richard causes the reader to feel certain emotions
towards him and his family and makes you understand how changing ones language
has deeper affects on that person then one might think.