Summary on "Bootstraps"

Summarizing

Purpose: In Bootstraps, Villanueva is interested in knowing more about the various obstacles one may face as a minority of any sort. In his case, he was a Community student entering a university with not the greatest GPA. And to top it off, he was Puerto Rican. Villanueva emphasizes greatly how he felt severely pressured to meet his goal of graduating as a linguistics teacher. Through emphasizing this, he's showing the reader about the difficulty that one may experience when one desires something greatly. He also emphasizes the importance of rhetoric to his audience by using great philosophers and political leaders.

Method: Villanueva's study may be rhetoric and how he tried to become a better writer through accepting upsetting comments. Villanueva reveals to his audience his role models in rhetoric. He conducts observations about how these great figures in history used rhetoric in very essential manners. Villanueva proposes that rhetoric is an important aspect in daily life and regular human language; he presumes that rhetoric has impacts on people, even for different popular topics and differences in cultures and beliefs. Villanueva articulates specifically in political matters that rhetoric was used by great philosophers to induce powerful messages to the people being spoken to.

Results: The concluding thoughts in this section of the book leads to the idea that Villanueva believes language and the study of writing effectively is a vital in life because what we learn can be passed onto new generations for expanding knowledge. Villanueva does not yield to thread his thought of racial and economic differences with language. The concluding thoughts allude to the idea that Villanueva believes language may be inherited in some sense to keep culture, background, and influences in language.

Evaluating

The message that I perceived from this reading was about culture and economic status and how it affects writing styles with rhetoric. I agree with Villanueva’s views on how important rhetorical language is along with background. Although we shouldn’t, we mostly write in a very biased way because of what we’ve experienced, which ultimately impacts certain readers. I also agree that rhetoric is very important in persuasive writing, and hopefully I’ll be able to use rhetoric effectively in my writing to expand my ideas better. The author’s ideas are related to what we’re doing in class because of how he expresses his writing process of length in days and how we researched rhetoric for making a paper  better.


Bibliography

Villanueva, V. (1993). From Bootstraps: From an American academic of color. New York, NY: National Council of Teachers of English. 86-105