"Me Talk Pretty One Day" and The Nuts and Bolts of College Writng

While reading David Sedaris’ essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, I was able to see that he does write effectively according to points brought up in Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. Though, not completely concise, the essay does show flow, and gracefulness.

            In The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, concision is defined as the “leanness of words” (Harvey 1). It gives examples such as reducing “Euthyphro continues to further justify his actions” to “Euthyphro continues to justify his actions” (Harvey 6). In a nutshell, you have to make your sentences short, sweet, and straight to the point. According to the points given in the book, Sedaris’ essay is not very concise. For example, when Sedaris receives his student ID:“After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich.”(Sedaris 11) .This passage has too many unnecessary details that don’t even have to do with the main point of the essay. The simple sentence “After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID” conveys the same message in 39 words less than the original.

                        While lacking in concision, “Me Talk Pretty One Day” has flow. When describing a fellow classmate, Sedaris states: “The first Anna hailed from an industrial town outside of Warsaw and had front teeth the size of tombstones. She worked as a seamstress, enjoyed quiet times with friends, and hated the mosquito.” (Sedaris 12). The description fits the examples given in The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. The book states that there should be something to bind the passage together, with references, to said something, that point back to it (Harvey 23). In Sedaris’ sentences, Anna is the subject, the “she” in the next sentence points back to Anna and links the two sentences together. Harvey also adds that a passage that “hands off” to the next subject has flow (Harvey23). For the above section, the next subject would be mosquitoes, as the following sentences are about the teacher rambling about mosquitoes.

            Another thing that Sedaris’ essay has is gracefulness. A point brought up in The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is how parallelism adds to the gracefulness of a piece (Harvey 50). In “Me Talk Pretty One Day” Sedaris states: “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). The parallel elements in the passage are delivered, learned, and declared. These elements are what make this part of Sedaris’ essay “graceful”.

            Overall, Sedaris’ essay displays many of the points given in The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, which makes Sedaris’ writing clear and effective.

            

Poetry Study Goals

•           Read the poem more than once for better understanding
•           Try to get into the habit of reading sentence by sentence, rather than just the individual lines
•           Learn more literary terms
•           Learn to figure out who is the speaker of the poem
•           Read a few lines around a reference to understand the context

When reading poems I tend to just read a poem once or twice, and most of the time I still don’t have a strong understand of the poem afterwards. Reading a poem four times using the steps given in the AP book would really help my understanding poems. Learning more literary terms would help too. A lot. There’s a good amount of words that I need to learn before the start before the school year. I’m pretty sure that whenever I read a poem I don’t even think to figure who in the world is talking. I feel that knowing who’s talking would really help in understand what’s going on in the poem. When I come across a reference I don’t understand, I normally just sit there and stare at it, hoping to find out what it means. Reading around what I’m trying to understand should help my understanding of a poem.  

Diagnostic Test

When I took the test, I was actually quite surprised about how I did. I expected to get almost everything wrong, but I managed to get a good amount of them correct. It really wasn't as terrible as I thought it was going to be, since I was able to get through a bit of it without being completely confused. The thing that really got me, though, was the vocabulary. If I had known the definitions to the words I was clueless about, I definitely would have done better. When I read "Forbidden Mourning", I really was confused by vocabulary, which ruined the imagery, which then almost left me totally lost. Though, to my surprise, I did okay when answering the questions (I probably just had a few lucky guesses). The one thing I did enjoy in the test was the poem "Night Clouds". I liked the picture the author painted in such a short poem. I also liked the passage from Pride and Prejudice. I never have actually read it before (and feel like I should really read it sometime soon), but I liked the converstion between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. Overall, I thought the test was okay, and some-what interesting. I know now that i'll probably have a lot of work to do this year, and (oddly enough) I kind of look forward to it.