There Is No Unmarked Woman

As I looked over the table of contents in the 50 Essays Portable Anthology one essay caught my eye. There were no flashy abnormal words or highly descriptive adjectives. My eyes just caught the word woman and I wondered what Deborah Tannen meant by saying there is no unmarked woman. So following this pondering I began to read her essay. Immediately I found myself engulfed inside her words and have her incredible rhetorical devices to thank.


When one begins reading an essay, the reader always hopes that the author will start out with a “bang” so to speak. The reader wants to immediately be drawn and interested in the essay and Tannen does just that. She uses her first couple of paragraphs to hook the reader as all good writers should. The way she achieves this is she paints a scene visually with her words. It helps the reader to stay focused and entertained in the beginning so they actually want to keep reading. I’ve found it also was a good way to introduce her main points in the essay.


Word choice says a lot about an author. One can sound childish, scholarly, or even disturbed with the help of word choice. I found that Tannen came off as intellectual but casual with her choice of words. She chose no large scholarly words that most would have trouble understanding. Instead, she chose words that intellectually described her points. I found this method very pleasing while reading.


When it came to sentence structure Tannen excelled. A good variety of both regular lengths, abnormally long, and substantially short sentences could be found. She may have casually favored the longer sentence. Although, it wasn’t enough that one got annoyed with it. To conclude, sentence-wise her essay was well written.


As for fluency and tone, both appealed to me. Tannen had a smooth charming fluency with her words. I did not find a single choppy spot as I read. I never found myself having to go over what I just read, because it continued at a smooth faster pace. Personally, I found her tone to come off as slightly feminist. It may have been just the topic her essay was on, but she still seemed to almost blame men or resent them for the fact that they had the choice to be unmarked or not.


In summarization, Tannen used the help of rhetorical devices to her advantage. By using good sentence fluency, an interesting tone, fantastic word choice, and imagery she hooks and keeps the audience. My applause goes out to Tannen for creating an essay were a teen might be able to read all the way through it without pausing to reread a section because of either a lack of interest, or complexity in words.