Sedaris talks Pretty

     "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris perfectly follows the guidelines laid out in Harvey's book The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. Really, it does. Poring through the book to pinpoint flaws in the essay, I realized that Sedaris makes fantastic use of concision, punctuation, and writes great beginnings and endings, among many other things. 

    For one, Sedaris is pretty concise with his storytelling. From the get go, you don't see him beating around the bush about what's going on. Harvey says concision makes prose graceful, easy to read, but may be hard to write, as an author may thing they are stripping all the meat off their writing, just leaving some bones. That isn't the case whatsoever here. He starts paragraphs bluntly, almost like a mission statement of what he's going to talk about. "I’ve moved to Paris with hopes of learning the language.", or "The first day of class was nerve-racking because I knew I’d be expected to perform" (Sedaris). These statements, although frank, are clear and concise, flow well with the essay, and make room for the equally concise but incredibly entertaining anecdotes. 

     Harvey tells us that punctuation is one of the commandments of writing, it's purpose, to make sure readers understand what you're writing. Scouring "Me Talk Pretty One Day", you cannot find any fault in his punctuation, even in sentences that would be easy to mess up, such as "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). Most people would have messed this sentence up somehow, by adding an extra comma, or getting rid of the dashes...but the way Sedaris does it, it reads smoothly in your head.
     The beginning and ending to this essay serve their purpose, or at least, Harvey would think that they would. He says that the beginning should grab a reader's attention and set them up, while and ending should make them feel like they read something worthwhile. At the beginning, he talks about how he's going back to school at age forty one. My first reaction was "wait, why?", so I kept on reading. He ends the first paragraph with a sentence that's unrelated to the rest of the essay, but kind of sets the humorous tone for the rest of the essay ("...billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich." (Sedaris)), which made me want to see more of that. The essay ends with him wrapping up an anecdote, so it doesn't have the typical "in conclusion..." feel, but he does sum up the point of his essay before it ends by saying "Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from
it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive" (Sedaris).
    With his use of concision, proper punctuation, and a good beginning and ending, Sedaris perfectly exemplifies what Harvey wants from an essay. He doesn't have to talk pretty some day, because he already does.