When I saw the title of Sedaris' essay, I gritted my teeth and prepared for a painful read. "Me Talk Pretty One Day?" All I could imagine was a nightmare of grammatical errors and broken English that would be about as pleasant to read as a dictionary. However, I was pleased by the quality of his essay. It genuinely amused me and I was impressed with Sedaris' writing abilities.
Although he probably didn't write it with a copy of The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing in hand, Sedaris displays his skills in impressive fashion with this humorous essay. The flow of the essay is very good, due in part to the fact that it is a narrative and "[good] essays unfold like stories" (Harvey 23). Sedaris uses a few characters very often in his work, mostly himself and his evil French professor. Instead of presenting "a jumble of characters," he has two main characters and introduces other minor characters as needed to further the purpose of his essay (Harvey 23).
The flow of the essay might have seemed spot-on to me, but when I looked more closely I saw that nearly half of Sedaris' paragraphs began with something along the lines of "the seamstress," "the second Anna," "the two Polish Annas;" did this not contradict Harvey's assertion that the opening sentence is "where the reader can see how the paragraph" is connected to the previous one (Harvey 71, Sedaris 2)? It seemed to be the flaw of the essay that I had been searching for, but those openings worked well to connect the ideas of each paragraphs, as Sedaris was dealing with a fairly straightforward story in his piece, recounting what had allegedly happened.
Lest I admit defeat and claim Sedaris could do no wrong, I turned to the beast that can defeat even the most talented writers: proper use of punctuation. Maybe the writer isn't the most careful person and had a comma or a period out of place that he missed. This is when my triumph came, and it was sweet. When quoting his mother, Sedaris wrote that she had said "'I love my cat, and I love ...' My sisters and I leaned forward, waiting to hear our names." Looks fine, right? Commas in the right places, chose to include the optional comma in the first phrase, the period is in the right place. But one thing was neglected: Sedaris used the three-dot ellipsis, ignoring Harvey's admonition that "if you are using [a] quotation to end a sentence in your essay, add a fourth dot, representing the period" (Harvey 65). How could Sedaris miss a detail so essential to his essay, creating such a monstrosity of ambiguity in a work which seemed to exemplify the clarity that Harvey had championed? It can only be said that the reader can never know for sure, but that they are on their own to decide what the author's real intent was.
Despite this catastrophic failure of Sedaris to adhere to the stringent rules of English punctuation, I feel that his essay is a great example of the type of writing taught by Nuts and Bolts. While it is not picture perfect, it is worth mentioning that the writer is only human; or at least I would hope so.
Although he probably didn't write it with a copy of The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing in hand, Sedaris displays his skills in impressive fashion with this humorous essay. The flow of the essay is very good, due in part to the fact that it is a narrative and "[good] essays unfold like stories" (Harvey 23). Sedaris uses a few characters very often in his work, mostly himself and his evil French professor. Instead of presenting "a jumble of characters," he has two main characters and introduces other minor characters as needed to further the purpose of his essay (Harvey 23).
The flow of the essay might have seemed spot-on to me, but when I looked more closely I saw that nearly half of Sedaris' paragraphs began with something along the lines of "the seamstress," "the second Anna," "the two Polish Annas;" did this not contradict Harvey's assertion that the opening sentence is "where the reader can see how the paragraph" is connected to the previous one (Harvey 71, Sedaris 2)? It seemed to be the flaw of the essay that I had been searching for, but those openings worked well to connect the ideas of each paragraphs, as Sedaris was dealing with a fairly straightforward story in his piece, recounting what had allegedly happened.
Lest I admit defeat and claim Sedaris could do no wrong, I turned to the beast that can defeat even the most talented writers: proper use of punctuation. Maybe the writer isn't the most careful person and had a comma or a period out of place that he missed. This is when my triumph came, and it was sweet. When quoting his mother, Sedaris wrote that she had said "'I love my cat, and I love ...' My sisters and I leaned forward, waiting to hear our names." Looks fine, right? Commas in the right places, chose to include the optional comma in the first phrase, the period is in the right place. But one thing was neglected: Sedaris used the three-dot ellipsis, ignoring Harvey's admonition that "if you are using [a] quotation to end a sentence in your essay, add a fourth dot, representing the period" (Harvey 65). How could Sedaris miss a detail so essential to his essay, creating such a monstrosity of ambiguity in a work which seemed to exemplify the clarity that Harvey had championed? It can only be said that the reader can never know for sure, but that they are on their own to decide what the author's real intent was.
Despite this catastrophic failure of Sedaris to adhere to the stringent rules of English punctuation, I feel that his essay is a great example of the type of writing taught by Nuts and Bolts. While it is not picture perfect, it is worth mentioning that the writer is only human; or at least I would hope so.
No comments:
Post a Comment