Not Even David Sedaris is Perfect

The essay—to most students (including me) it’s an extremely daunting word. However, The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing by Michael Harvey breaks this task into easier, smaller pieces. Most likely, anyone could learn a thing or two from this magical little book, including famous authors such as David Sedaris. For example, in his essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, Sedaris discusses his experience of learning French in Paris. While Sedaris has no problem writing with concision and honesty, he could use some tips from The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing regarding flow.

Even though Sedaris could use some help with flow, he has clearly mastered the art of concision. Concision is a “leanness of words” (Harvey 1). Without concision, writing becomes “big words, self-important phrasing [and] a flat tone” (Harvey 1). In “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, Sedaris does not have a problem with wordiness. He uses simple sentences such as “I’ve moved to Paris with hopes of learning the language” (Sedaris) and “understanding doesn’t mean you can suddenly speak the same language” (Sedaris). There is not a whole lot that Sedaris can cut out of either of those sentences. He also chooses to mostly use simple English vocabulary. Sedaris could easily have replaced the word “loved” with something more pretentious-sounding such as “adored” or “cherished”, but he chose not to.   The rest of his essay is like that, too, which kept the tone lively.

“It takes honesty to say what we see and think, and courage to tell the truth” (Harvey 21). There’s no denying that Sedaris possesses such courage. He does not hesitate to admit in the beginning that he “understood only half of what this woman was saying” (Sedaris) in French. Sedaris could have tried to hide behind the passive voice and instead said “this women was little understood by the students”. However, he unflinchingly accepts the blame. Sedaris also describes a girl in his class as having “front teeth the size of tombstones” (Sedaris) and even calls his teacher a “saucebox”. Sedaris does not try to conceal his opinions behind words; rather, they’re sitting there loud and proud for the reader to view. In fact, it’s almost like the reader is inside Sedaris’s mind as the thoughts come to him.

The fact that the essay reads like it’s simply Sedaris’s inner thoughts also causes a problem: the paragraphs don’t flow because the tense constantly changes. According to Harvey, a passage “involves motion—movement from point A to point B” (Harvey 22). This does not occur enough in Sedaris’s essay. For example, in a single paragraph he comments “The first day of class was nerve-racking” (Sedaris), talks about the French teacher, reflects on how he “spent quite a few summer in Normandy, and…took a monthlong French class” (Sedaris) and then returns to more information regarding the French teacher. This whole mess occurs in the span of five sentences. Harvey believes that “repeating important terms” (Harvey 23) can help improve flow, too. However, Sedaris fails at this too. As shown in the previous example, there are no links. It feels like five separate thoughts jumbled in to a paragraph.

Nothing, and nobody, is perfect. This remains true regarding David Sedaris’s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”. While Sedaris had no problems with being concise and honest, his essay did not flow as well as it could have. Even he could learn something from reading The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing.