Summary Of Taylor Mali's Poem Speak With Conviction

Taylor Mali is a famous poet and teacher that has traveled across the United States performing his poetry in slam poetry competitions as well as at universities and conventions. His career as a poet is based off of his passion for teaching sixth grade children. Many of Mali’s poems tell stories from his career as a teacher. Through his poems, he shares his knowledge about America’s youth, and he gains credibility as he speaks of his real-life experiences. In one of his poems, “Speak with Conviction,” he recognizes the problem that the current generation suffers to speak in a declarative and articulate manner, even more, it seems that parents and teachers have more or less accepted this way of communication, as if questioning and inarticulate …show more content…
Mali’s expressive facial expressions and sarcastic tone within this poem display that he would like his character as the speaker to be humorous. Mali also assumes that the audience has realized this way of communicating, and he therefore anticipates that he will hear laughter throughout the audience. Furthermore, I think Mali may have used the word “uncool” to imply that this poem is referring to young adolescents since that group is the most likely to use that term. He is probably using the vocabulary that he would often hear at recess during his teaching …show more content…
The redundancy of these phrases throughout his poem provides the audience with numerous examples of the way our society relentlessly uses these phrases. Another example of this can be seen as he inquires, “Declarative sentences, so called because they used to, like, you know, declare things to be true? As opposed to other things that are, like, totally, you know, not?” This example implies that declarative sentences are supposed to serve as declarations, but with certain words, they can become sentences. Mali displays how the term “you know” can transform a statement into a question. In one of the previous lines which referred to “the invisible question mark,” Mali’s tone of voice converted a statement into a question, but in this line, Mali used a phrase to transform a declarative sentence into an interrogative sentence. The “question phrase,” “you know” corrects the grammatical error in the first stanza, but still fails to make the speaker sound informed and knowledgeable. He also uses phrases such as: “you know,” “like,” and “totally” to continue stressing the lack of those who speak with authority. One of the issues with the persistent use of these terms is that the terms can easily detract from the main point that the speaker is trying to make. Often, the listener might begin to shift their focus away from the speaker’s points and focus on irrelevant