3rd Summer Work Post
You Talk Pretty Already
Learning
a foreign language is never easy, and even a language known since birth can be
a struggle when you write it. Supporting
the advice given in Michael Harvey’s The
Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, David Sedaris tells a story of mastering
French in Me Talk Pretty One Day. And while his French might not be the best,
the flow, tenses and punctuation Sedaris uses in Me Talk Pretty One Day could all be stand-out examples in The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing.
Sedaris for the
most part uses the past tense. He’s
recounting a tale that has already happened; instead of saying “I’m startled”
he uses “I was startled” (Sedaris 11).
As advised in The Nuts and Bolts
of College Writing, he only switches to the present tense when explaining
the French customs he continues to experience, showing the reader his current
status in France .
He also makes good use of the active
voice, where it is the subject does something, as compared to the passive voice
where the subject is acted upon (Harvey
16). Found on page 14, the sentence
“Fall arrived and it rained every day” is active, because the subject, which is
the fall, did the action by arriving. If
used in the passive voice, we would get the “turgid prose” Harvey
disdains: something to the effect of “a few weeks later the weather changed and
it became fall” (Harvey 19).
Punctuation
might not seem like that big of a deal, but Harvey
urges us to stay away from breaking the rules of punctuation or grammar unless
we wish to seem ignorant or careless (Harvey
34). Luckily for Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day was not as the
title might suggest. The only obvious
mistake I found was a one-letter typo.
All of the punctuation described in The
Nuts and Bolts of College Writing could be found in our little excerpt:
commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, parentheses, questions. Sedaris may be one of those writers who use
the “flexible and flashy” dashes to create force the reader to pause since
there were two within pages of each other (Harvey
42).
Me Talk Pretty One Day is a narration,
and all events follow in chronological order.
An entire semester is discussed in a few short pages, and it is
imperative that the paragraphs, each with a distinct purpose and topic,
flow. Sedaris creates transitions into
new paragraphs by jumping right into them with a strong opening sentence, whose
job is to “tell the reader what a paragraph is about” (Harvey
71). “The first day of class was
nerve-racking because I knew I’d be expected to perform,” opens up to a paragraph
describing the first challenges the narrator faces (Sedaris 11). Dialogue is also used to open up new ideas
and begin paragraphs in an effective way.
David Sedaris’
French might need another semester or two, but his “college writing” English makes
the cut. He is able to “talk pretty”, communicate
clearly, and effectively, which is what Michael Harvey and The Nuts and Bolt of College Writing is all about.
