A Commuters Thoughts

 

          “New York City is one of the world’s most diverse cities, with a wide variety of communities with their own cultures, ideals, and values!” As a New York city resident, I’ve been told statements like these a lot, indirectly and directly. I’m sure most New Yorkers know this, and see it around them every single day as they go about their lives, but as I go about my morning commute to college, I sometimes start to think about how we managed to create a community while being so diverse, and how we even manage to communicate with each other in the first place. Of course the standard answer to the question is the implied requirement of being able to speak English, which allows us to have a unified language. For the many immigrants however, their English isn’t fluent enough and their knowledge of our “customs” isn’t well known, prohibiting them from using English as a common ground for their community.
As I come home, with these thoughts still on my mind, I greet my parents politely in English. Brushing off this normal greeting, I unknowingly answered my own question. My Dominican parent’s know English very well, but have always struggled with fancy English that I jokingly use to greet them, however, they still understood me despite that. They understand me due to their experience with me and their own language that they’ve developed with me as I’ve grown up with them. Realizing this, I began to realize the importance of connections, not specifically culture, or language, or any of that, but just how people are connected to each other in a community. With one person and a friend group, you would feel an alignment in personal interest which allows you to make understandings between each other, and as one person in a neighborhood, you have the shared understanding of what’s going around each other, and can communicate based on that, everyone in New York City shares the same knowledge, allowing us to understand disputes, move around, and co-exist without too much need to even speak, allowing everything on my morning commute to go smoothly despite everyone’s differences and destinations. New York is very noticeably a diverse city, and by living together in the same city and mingling with each other, we don’t need some pristine English to get by, we adopt cultures and offer our own.

Analysis:

          In writing this, I intended to challenge the idea of a standard language unifying communities of all levels, and to have others similar to me think more about the implications of how they communicate with others. As such, I appealed almost directly towards New York citizens in my writing, as I, a New York resident, would be able to express how their communities may work more accurately than I would other cities.
I heavily relied on my own experiences and thoughts throughout, making a blog much more reasonable in accomplishing what I intended. Casual thoughts always appear better in a simple, disorganized blog post. It would bolster a much more casual audience, maybe someone reading through on a commute, or relaxing in their home, allowing them more room to think about the things around them.
          By using my thoughts and experiences in the first place, it allows me to push my reader through a similar thought process, albeit I wasn’t as thorough as I wanted to be. In doing this, I can instead leave the reader lingering with their own thoughts, not necessarily taking my conclusion as fact, and even questioning what I said. To even accomplish this however, I needed to heavily rely on Ethos and Logos, as I wasn’t exactly trying to persuade but instead birth thoughts and questions. I first heavily reinforced the idea of New York City and its surprising functionality despite its overwhelming diversity, only to then directly challenge the importance of standard English, directly appealing to logos. I then proceed to use my own example of something to follow through with my own thoughts on the situation, therefore using ethos in order to show myself as a fellow New Yorker and provide some possible similarities between me and the reader. In the end, I really hoped to have people thinking of their own personal experiences, and in doing so challenge what I myself have said.