Headline: Newly Born Baby Talks Pretty and Writes Memoir

In an essay by Steven Pinker, “Baby Born Talking—Describes Heaven,” he writes of how he read in a tabloid that a baby was born in Italy who started communicating verbally about the wonders of heaven and expressed confusion as to why he was brought back to Earth, which leads him into the topic of how infants learn to speak a language.

After reading Pinker’s essay I was reminded of Sedaris’ experience learning the French language as an adult in his essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” According to Pinker’s theory, “children record some words parents use in isolation or in stressed final positions, like Look-at-the-BOTTLE. Then they look for matches to these words in longer stretches of speech, and find other words by extracting the residues in between the matched portions.”

Is this the same way Sedaris learned to speak French? Most say that learning a language is harder for people over the age of twelve than it is for an infant. I disagree with this. Sedaris was exposed to the French language not just in his adult education classroom but in the streets of France. He believed that he was not learning anything from the language then suddenly he realized he was picking up words and phrases others would say but he could not yet respond correctly.

This is the same way a baby learns to speak. Infants can understand but have not yet fully developed the correct grammar skills to respond properly.

This is an obvious example of why Rodriguez disagrees with bilingual education in his essay, “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood.” Sedaris unknowingly learned a vast amount of information and did not even realize it until he saw the fruit of the teachings. I was pretty set on bilingual education being great idea but after reading the information in both Pinker’s and Sedaris’ essay, I am knocked slightly off balance on my stance. Do bilingual education’s advantages outweigh the disadvantages?

What's wrong with ADOPTION?!

In “The Bitter Price of Choice,” by Frederica Mathews-Green, persuasion is very effective. Mathews-Green knows her audience extremely well, assuming the crowd is pro-choice. It gives her an extreme advantage as far as using the story of how she was very much pro-choice to receive immediate trust. Then she explains her true purpose to the writing: to share the reasoning for changing from pro-choice to pro-life.
She uses little anecdotes that exemplify the way abortions are carried out but in such a way that focuses away from the fact that it could possibly make a woman’s life easier to not deal with a child and relieve a large amount of stress in her life but focuses towards the gruesome procedure itself. “She climbs onto a clinic table and endures a violation deeper than rape—the nurse’s hand is wet with her tears—then is grateful to pay for it, grateful to be adapted to the social machine that reject her when pregnant.”
The statistics she puts in is also very effective because the numbers are so staggering. I do not think abortion is a good idea at all and I’m very much against it. No matter what the circumstance is I believe adoption is always the best alternative. I do not think someone can destroy life and deny that child the same opportunities you had in your lifetime. It makes me sad that a person couldn’t live with his or herself for putting a child in the adoption system but feels more secure with abortion.