You Talk Pretty Already

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.