"Me Talk Pretty One Day" Analysis
It is easy to enjoy and
appreciate David Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day”. Critiquing the essay by applying the rules in The Nuts and
Bolts of College Writing was rewarding. The book made understanding Sedaris
wrote his essay and picking out familiar things within the essay quite simple.
Many technique used by Sedaris are discussed in Harvey’s, The Nuts and Bolts
of College Writing. In “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, Sedaris’s problem and
journey from being intimidated and afraid to speak French and of the language
gets resolved at the end of the story when we see him speak with a newfound
confidence he did not have at the beginning of the essay. This relates to what
Harvey discussed in his book about a method known as coming full circle, or
“closing the circle” (Harvey 83). This method of finishing an essay or story
with coming full circle allows the reader to link aspects of the writing from
the beginning with new details discovered at the end.
David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day” is fun to read because he gets
straight to the point and is quick to get rid of what he finds to be extra
words. He writes in a style that is not as common in most writing. His description
of his anxious feelings towards his professor provides comedic relief
for the reader. His very frank style of writing could be considered a “pompous
style” (Harvey 4).
By
reading The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing and comparing the style and
techniques we learned from that with "Me Talk Pretty One Day" it made
critiquing and discovering the writing style of David Sedaris easier to do and
appreciate.
You make a good claim in the first support paragraph and defend it reasonably well with evidence, but then the second support paragraph is a rushed jumble of thoughts that are without supporting evidence and that make me wonder how carefully you read Harvey."Frank" and "pompous" are not exactly mutually exclusive, but I don't really see how Sedaris' frank style could be called "pompous," which is a bad thing that some of the ideas in the rest of your paragraph seem to rule out. You really just aren't effectively covering a lot of territory in this essay, I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteMarie,
ReplyDeleteI'd have to agree with Ms. H on this one. I really like your first paragraph, but I think your second one could actually be split into two main ideas: 1. Writing Concisely and 2. Comedy (or one of Harveys other techniques) for a second one. Also, I thought your choice of using the closed circle in your first para was really interesting. I personally did not see much change in Sedaris' speech grammatically, so I didn't think to use that, but the way you explain it the full circle was his increased confidence, not his new skill!
Erin Donahue
This assignment is very challenging in that Nuts and Bolts covered so much material. It seems like after writing one solid paragraph, you realized it would be ridiculous to do that for every single chapter in the book, and tried to sum up the general feel of what Harvey was going for in a few sentences. In any analysis, we can write about every single aspect, so next time, pick just a few 'chapters' out of Harvey (a few techniques) to analyze really thoroughly.
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