Silko’s attitude is conveyed by her appeal to ethos, her use of figurative language, and contrast between her conversational tone and her formal erudite diction concerning the study of English.
Silko opens the piece with an appeal to ethos by explaining her origins with a nice use of parallelism when she states “the words…most valued are…unpremeditated and unrehearsed.” This effects the reader by letting us feel as if she is speaking intimately with us. Her assertion of her origins—how her people and her culture view words—is meant to begin bridging a gap between the speaker and the audience with prior knowledge of the speaker.
Sliko then changes her mode of discourse to definition by using negative diction to define a written speech or statement. Her use of words like “suspect”, “hidden”, and “detached” all lead the reader to feel how negative the Pueblos view premeditated and rehearsed statements. This again is meant to help the audience not only understand her origins but also help to bridge the contrasting views of her and her audience. Since her audience is educated in the Western tradition, they have been indoctrinated in believing that the best writing, the best speeches, the best thinking is born not from spontaneity but from revision, reflection, and classical structure. She speaks to this next when she paradoxically refers to the Pueblo’s experience as nontraditional and then defines this as in the oral tradition. This is intended to reveal to the audience the backward and closed lens they use when considering what is traditional written structure. She implies that the oral tradition should not be omitted from the traditional language studies and in fact that because all written language study is a byproduct of oral language that traditional written language studies requires its own creation story—one which recognizes oral tradition as the progenitor of written language.
She moves on to expand these definitions in more simplistic and figurative ways. First she uses the bullet structure of countless outlines, “Part A” “Part B to Part C, to define the western structure. She contrasts this dry, rigid exemplification with a simile of a spider’s web, filling the exemplification with imagery. Her choice in describing the Western structure as mundane and elementary and the Pueblo structure as rich and figurative coincides with her attitude about how each make meaning. By using the spider’s web and imagery such as “many little threads..radiating from a center and crisscrossing” She focuses the reader attention to her final point in paragraph one, that”the structure[will] emerge” and that “you…must..trust.. that meaning will be made.”
The next paragraph moves to the interconnectedness of the telling and the words and the story with the words and the speaker. She states this through parallelism of “whole of creation” and “whole o history” that context is central to the Pueblo way. She actually in many ways tries to demonstrate this point in the previous paragraph by filling in her origins and two genesis stories: on about her and one about oral tradition creating written tradition.
Silko ends the second paragraph with the personification of words. She states that words cannot “be alone”. They are with “other words” and almost always exist in the context, historical and connected, of stories. By personifying winds she seeks to make the analogy that just as a person, a people, a tribe has a history which is essential to them, so do words. Words, do not spring from thin air, they like men are born from others, which are born from others all the way back to the creation of the first word—or back even further to the first sound that carried meaning. Both words and the Pueblos that use them cannot be considered without considering them in a story which provides not just context but history.
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