sedaris is the prettiest girl at the harvest moon ball

Despite being a narrative, David Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day” exhibits the ideal qualities of academic papers specified in Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing very well. Harvey’s ideas of gracefulness and clarity, among other characteristics, are perfectly embodied in Sedaris’ essay. However, Sedaris occasionally neglects Harvey’s idea of concision, adopting the dreaded “Pompous Style” or including unnecessary expressions.

“Me Talk Pretty One Day” is a remarkably graceful excerpt that doesn’t stumble over what it’s trying to say. The events and ideas are phrased in ways that are easy to process. For example, Sedaris lists off some things he likes and dislikes to his teacher: “When called upon, I delivered an effortless list of things that I detest: blood sausage, intestinal pates, brain pudding. I’d learned these words the hard way. Having given it some thought, I then declared my love for IBM typewriters, the French word for bruise, and my electric floor waxer.” (Sedaris, 13). Notice how both lists contain three items; this is called tricolon, and Harvey dedicates a section of his book to it (Harvey, 5.4). Tricolon is a kind of parallelism, based on the idea that 3 is a magic number that is balanced and simple to process. Sedaris also uses this literary structure when telling us about what his drunken mother loves as well (Sedaris, 12).

            Sedaris’ diction also gives this excerpt a high degree of clarity. Harvey instructs us to “Choose the Active Voice over the Passive Voice” (Harvey, 2.3). The reasons he gives against the passive voice are about intentionally obfuscating information in politics and thus not really applicable, but the principle still applies. The passive voice leaves the agent of the sentence unclear, and abuse of it could lead the reader into a lot of confusion. Sedaris avoids this problem by using the active voice almost exclusively in his writing. The few times at which he does use the passive voice could be excused, considering this piece is intended to be a descriptive narrative rather than pure exposition.

             The essay is not without flaws, however. Pompous writing, condemned by Harvey in the first chapter, is found in several isolated places where Sedaris’ usual, more concise language would be appropriate. One such example is found on the third page of the excerpt: “While I can honestly say that I love leafing through medical textbooks devoted to severe dermatological conditions, the hobby is beyond the reach of my French vocabulary, and acting it out would only have invited controversy.” (Sedaris, 13).  The vocabulary choices and sentence structure are needlessly formal, unlike most of the passage. Another such example is also on the third page: “I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand, thinking – but not saying – that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object which is incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.” (Sedaris, 13). The humor is charming, but again, the phrasing has a particularly high concentration of fancy words and doesn’t get straight to the point. Like his use of the passive voice, however, this could be attributed to the nature of the essay.

            Generally speaking, Sedaris wrote a fantastic piece that adheres to the guidelines set forth by Harvey. For the most part, he sticks with the ideas of gracefulness and clarity very well. And drifting away from concision from time to time may be forgivable, because “Me Talk Pretty One Day” is a narrative.