Chapter 10 - Mother Tongue - Questions on Rhetoric and Style: Tan criticizes herself twice in this essay. In paragraph 3, she quotes a speech she gave “filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases. . . .” What are “nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases,” and why are they burdensome? At another point, Tan recalls a draft of The Joy Luck Club in which she wrote, “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state” (para. 20). Why does she call this “[a] terrible line”?