David
Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day” is a comical and entertaining essay about the
trials and tribulations of learning French.
His essay is well written and relates to the audience by following the
rules set out in The Nuts and Bolts of
College Writing by Michael Harvey, although he also breaks them. Looking at the big picture, Sedaris obeys
Harvey’s rules concerning style. When it comes down to the smaller details,
however, he lacks some of the skills laid out by Harvey.
One
detail that Sedaris does follow is using the active voice over the passive
voice. Using the active voice means that
the subject performs the action (Harvey 12). Harvey warns not to use the passive voice too
often because “the subject doesn’t do anything - it is acted upon…The doer of
the action often drops out altogether,” (Harvey 16). In Sedaris’ essay, the doer definitely does
not drop out. Almost every verb is
spoken in an active voice making every character’s actions stand out which
keeps the action moving. In the
sentence, “Two Polish Annas raised their hands, and the teacher instructed them
to present themselves,” he uses the active voice twice (Sedaris 12). The first is “two Polish Annas raised”, and
the second is “the teacher instructed”.
While Sedaris uses this skill well, he does make mistakes in other areas.
The
error that stands out most in Sedaris’ writing is mistakes in parallelism. When used correctly, parallelism organizes
key words within a sentence to make it easier to read (Harvey 50). Not to say that the essay “Me Talk Pretty One
Day” is difficult to read, but it could be more clear and concise if
parallelism was used more often. An
example of faulty parallelism is in the sentence, “They were limited in terms
of vocabulary, and this made them appear less than sophisticated,” (Sedaris
12). If parallelism is applied, the
sentence reads, “They were limited in terms of vocabulary, so they appeared
less than sophisticated.” Not only does this
make the sentence more simple, parallelism also “makes writing more comprehensible,
graceful, and memorable” (Harvey 50).
Even
without proper parallelism, Sedaris’ piece is memorable because of its simple style. Harvey’s main pet peeve that he mentions
several times in The Nuts and Bolts of
College Writing is writing in the pompous style. According to him, the pompous style includes “big
words, self-important phrasing, a flat tone, long gobs of prepositional
phrases, nouns galore, and abuse of the passive voice” (Harvey 1). The main way to avoid pompous writing is to
keep it simple. Some people may think
they have to make every sentence grand and ornate to be a good writer. Harvey and Sedaris both seem to agree,
however, that the opposite does the job.
Sedaris constructs sentences such as, “I’ve moved to Paris with hopes of
learning the language,” which uses everyday words and an active voice (Sedaris
11). This downplayed style relates to
the audience because it makes the story feel like a conversation about his trip
to Paris. No one would ever say in a
conversation, “I have made the long journey to the bustling city of Paris,
France with the desire of mastering the most romantic language in the world that
is French.” That just sounds
ridiculous. Leaving the pompous style behind
makes writing more direct, so the audience is able to connect with it.
The connection a reader is able to
make with “Me Talk Pretty One Day” is mostly due to Sedaris’ accomplishments on
the essay as a whole. However, with
closer examination by Michael Harvey’s standards more errors could surely be
found. Slip-ups show up here and there,
which is not something the average reader would pick up on, but if each one was
corrected the essay would be improved.
Details aside, David Sedaris is a great writer with the ability to
capture the audience with his humor and conversation-like writing. Examining this piece for its correctness, and
its mistakes, shows that no one is done learning and growth is always possible.
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