Anzaldúa's essay "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" uses many literary devices to make her point. One of the most obvious is her use of quotations in the piece to associate her argument with other arguments or to make comparisons. The story from which the title of the piece is taken functions as a kind of metaphor for Chicana women. The idea is that the woman's tongue represents the different "tongues," or languages, Anzaldúa speaks and that this multiplicity of languages reflects her complex mutliethnic heritage.

Another device Anzaldúa uses is her sudden shifting from Spanish to English and back again. This is both a demonstration of one of her main points about language as a kind of border—and how Chicanos straddle that border—and a kind of replication of the discourse she describes. As a non-Spanish speaker, the essay can be a challenge to read, because important parts are rendered in Spanish. The challenge is instructive: it forces the non-Spanish reader to work to translate the material but also raises the question of why Spanish is used in the first place and how the sentiments expressed in Spanish would be different if translated into English. In other words, it forces the English-speaking reader to experience in a small way the linguistic oppression Chicanos have endured for years.