I find Gloria Anzaldua’s writing more captivating and riveting, even though it is much longer. She uses a great mix of anecdote, structure, and emotive language with vivid examples and descriptions to convey that her tongue may be wild, but it is her’s nonetheless. Her strategy differs from the College Composition and Communication (CCCC) based on the audience.

Anzaldua is trying to create mass appeal in an audience that may not be familiar with her or sympathetic to her, and over whom she has no authority. The CCCC, however, is issuing a communique to its own members to give a directive on a problem they have all been contemplating for a while. We see that the two needed vastly different approaches: while one only needed a memo, the other needed to capture a neutral ( or even hostile) audience and bring them over to her side. Gloria Anzaldua and the Conference on CCCC both express the same concern, albeit in different tones and approaches: they fear that an academic effort to Americanize ethnic students is bad both for personal liberty, and Academics itself. They describe a current effort to tame wildlings, so to speak and homogenize them into a single cultural paste. Anzaldua describes both an effort within academia and outside in her own family and in society, while the CCCC describes one from within their own ranks. The point is clearly made by both that people from different backgrounds will speak with different dialects, even when they are speaking the same language, and that the language can be made richer by this.

 Anzaldua used a whole set of techniques but most notable are vivid language and humor. She gave the detailed description of specific interaction she had where the aim of the other person was to get her to behave less Latino and more American. She also uses humor in telling both the English and Spanish terms that were spoken in those efforts, especially the saying “flies don’t enter a closed mouth.” The CCCC used formal diction as in the language of technical writing. But once could forgive them for the irony of being so straight in a document meant to instruct others to loosen up.