Third Entry-language

"Me Talk Pretty One Day" and The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing

In his essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris writes about his experience learning French at a school in France.  He manages to write in a formal style, but keeps the tone light and casual.  This creates a funny and entertaining story that still follows the advice given by Michael Harvey in his book The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing.

Sedaris is effective in using conjunctions in his writing.  For example, in this sentence: “After paying my tuition…” (11), Sedaris uses the conjunction to connect this sentence with the one before it.  Conjunctions “help prose feel connected from sentence to sentence” (Harvey 30).  This is exactly what Sedaris does throughout his essay, leading the audience through and helping show what is coming next. 

In addition to conjunctions, Sedaris also uses many commas in this essay.  Almost every sentence in this essay contains commas and many of them contain multiple commas.  This is shown in the second sentence: “After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a carton stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich” (11).  Despite the length of the sentence, the reader can still understand what is going on.  This follows what Harvey says, that “commas allow one to create long, complex sentences that are still readable” (35).

There are only a couple examples of passive voice in the Sedaris’ essay, but the places where he does use it are reasonable.  When describing the returning students, he writes, “vacations were recounted, and questions were raised…” (11). The passive voice doesn’t identify the subject: who exactly recounted the vacations or raised the questions.  This is because he didn’t know.  Sedaris wants to emphasize this feeling of unfamiliarity.  Everything is foreign, the school, the people, even the language.  Harvey says, “passive voice makes sense when you want to emphasize an action…” (17), which Sedaris does in this passage.

Sedaris follows Harvey’s advice on using tricolon.  Examples in groups of three are everywhere in Sedaris’ essay.  He mentions that the first Anna “worked as a seamstress, enjoyed quiet times with friends and hated the mosquito” (12).  When he talks about the things he hates, he lists three things: “blood sausage, intestinal pates, brain pudding” (13).  When he talks about the things he loves, he lists three things: “IBM typewriters, the French word for bruise and [his] electric floor waxer” (13).  Even the actions of the teacher are in groups of three: “she crouched low for her attack, placed her hands on the young woman’s desk, and leaned close…”  All of these groups of three help to make the essay feel “balanced and complete when they contain three items” (Harvey 53).  

   “Me Talk Pretty One Day” follows many of the suggestions given in The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. Sedaris avoids using the “collegiate pompous style” or in other words, “big words, self-important phrasing, a flat one, long gobs of prepositional phrases, nouns galore, and abuse of the passive voice” (1). This creates an effective narration, giving the audience an enjoyable experience through his stor