Spanish

As a bilingual speaker, Rodriguez wrote Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood to disapprove “bilingual education.” Narrating about his childhood living as a bilingual child in the states, he claims his points. For the successful deliverance of his message, he uses several writing styles—metaphor, parenthesis, and anaphora—throughout his essay.
In the first part of his memoir, Rodriguez refers himself as a listening child who carefully hears the very different sounds of Spanish and English. Since he was newly exposed to English speaking circumstance, he was not familiar with English enough to understand it like his mother tongue, Spanish. To show his awkwardness toward new language, he uses metaphor like exotic polysyllabic sounds, sound booming with confidence, and distinct sounds to refer to English. Not only the exoticness, but also the fact that he does not go for bilingual education from childhood explains why he belittled English itself. To strengthen his argument, Rodriguez needed to deliver his difficulties as bilingual child, so he shows what he felt during childhood by using metaphors. Throughout his memoir, Rodriguez puts parenthesis in his sentences. Phrases put in between hyphens mostly show his deeper feelings. This explicit expression of his feelings somehow shows his lack of confidence writing in English. He is trying to convey his unpolished speech of his childhood through the use of parenthesis, as well as to give detailed information. He needs to pull sympathy from readers, so he writes his memoir with details to help readers imagine his childhood. For instance, gaudy yellow in a row of white bungalows vividly describes his childhood. By following his description, readers can imagine his life before and sympathize with similar situations.
After writing about distressful experiences at States, he uses anaphora to juxtapose Spanish with English. By repeating phrase the language, Rodriguez emphasizes that his family was only one using Spanish,