TOW #6 - "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris (Written Text)

          David Sedaris, nominated for three Grammy Awards, writes an essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day” about his experience in a school in Paris with the hopes of learning French. His teacher always threw insults and ridiculed all the little things her students said, picking apart their answers and leaving them sputtering for a response with their limited vocabulary when she somehow turns it around on them. For Sedaris, he originally believes his teacher to simply be out to get every single one of them, boiling with some sort of unreasonable hatred that led some of her students to believe they just were not good enough for learning the language at all. He soon realizes, and thus wants to share with all other students who have had a seemingly terrifying teacher in the past, or even the present, that her method of teaching, although challenging, also helped him learn things before he even realized it. Her nitpicking had led him to study much longer than required and put in so much effort that he began to actively learn the language himself rather than from the perspective of another.

           Sedaris’s diction is one of the devices he uses effectively to convey this message. His referral to the teacher’s various actions as “accusing” or as an “attack” (Sedaris 220) helps to convince the reader that he believes her to be a vicious and terrifying woman who aims only to harm her students, especially when he begins to share how his fear, along with other students, began to seep into their everyday actions. The fact that he still refers to her insults as “abuse” (Sedaris 222) even at the end of the essay would hopefully leave the reader with the impression that yes, she is still merciless, but he now takes the abuse in stride because he knows it is what helps him strive to learn at a much more effective pace than if his teacher were to coax him gently through baby sets without much fear of failure. Had he been cushioned with every fall, he never would have learned to efficiently survive on his own in the “sink or swim” (Sedaris 219) course. I believe the way in which he applied this approach of creating his moral of the story serves its purpose surprisingly well, and the responses it managed to pull from me occurred before I even realized it.