"Me Talk Pretty One Day" Analysis

I’ll start this analysis of David Sedaris’s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” on a more personal note. As someone who came to America not knowing any English and had to either learn it or be left behind, I empathize with Sedaris in this situation. I also appreciate how Sedaris followed many of the rules in Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing and “artistically bent” some of the others in order to effectively convey his experience.

Sedaris’s voice is so clear in this essay because of how clearly and concisely he writes. The only twenty-dollar words were in French and a stray “dermatological”, but there aren’t many elegant synonyms for the latter. Harvey remarks that “Concision can add remarkable grace to our prose” (1). Sedaris exemplifies this. While maintaining a varied vocabulary and not boring the reader, he steers clear of verbose phrasing and sentences that run on and on in the passive voice. Although he occasionally slips into the passive voice – e.g. “Vacations were recounted, and questions were raised” (Sedaris 11) – he does not overuse it and maintains parallel structure. Moreover, by keeping his language simple, Sedaris makes his story much more believable and follows Harvey’s advice: “Readers Expect Accuracy” (58). The reader can easily imagine someone speaking what is written: “It was startling because (a) [my emphasis] I hadn’t been asked that question in a while and (b) [my emphasis] I realized, while laughing, that I myself did not know the alphabet” (Sedaris 11). He truly sounds like a student, not a post-doc in law.

I remarked that Sedaris occasionally bends a few of Harvey’s rules, but he never quite breaks them. By employing Harvey’s idea of “punch lines” (27), or something similar to it, Sedaris makes his essay more enjoyable, but actually disrupts the flow of certain lines to do it. I’m referring to his way of substituting gibberish for English to indicate that he didn’t understand the French. On the first day of class, his teacher says, “‘If you have not meimslsxp or lgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room. Has everyone apzkiubjxow?’” (Sedaris 11). The abrupt breaks in the English disorient the reader just as the French disoriented him. Sedaris, a comedian, did this to get the punch line effect. Just as he would do in standup work, he crafted a “careful setup and good punch line” to “write sentences people like to read” (Harvey 27).

In addition to abruptly disrupting the flow of English with gibberish, Sedaris stylistically chooses to remove any semblance of flow or grace in his translation of the students’ French. However, this does not mean that he ignores word choice. By carefully limiting the vocabulary of the students’ speech, he emphasizes that the students were still fumbling with speaking French, but by continuing to choose his words carefully (just as he did to achieve clarity and concision), he makes it clear what the students meant as well as why they speak so strangely. Having taken a second language, I know what it sounds like when beginning students conjugate verbs incorrectly, and Sedaris’s translations, like “‘I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus’” (15) are quite accurate, and, again, “Readers Expect Accuracy” (Harvey 58).

Sedaris bends some of the rules of flow by justifying it with other techniques that provide clarity, honesty, and humor. He does not break them spontaneously, because doing so would “saddle [his] readers with lifeless, shapeless sentences littered with prepositions and ugly, boring nouns” (Harvey 20). By balancing this artistic flair with good word choice and concision, Sedaris writes an essay that is both easy and fun to read.