Parody Henry Mayhew's Watercress Girl

The donut boy who gave me the following statement, although 42 years of age, had entirely operated in all the childish manners, and was, indeed, in thoughts and manner, a young boy. There was something cruelly pathetic in hearing this young adult, so immature that his features had seized to form, instead he looked like a 12 year old chubby boy who only lived to eat. I did not know how to talk to him. At first I treated him as a man, speaking on mature subjects; so that I might, by being familiar with him, remove all awkwardness of this man child and get him to narrate his life freely. I asked him what he did for work. “Work!” he replied in wonder, “why would I work? My mother takes care of me!” I explained to him, telling him that work was

These techniques included the investigative journalist technique, heavy use of commas, speech along with his interpretation of the little girls behavior, and the description of her

I found it to be an interesting technique that immediately gave evidence to the reader how he came about the information. Secondly after reading the “Watercress Girl” I was left in a rather somber mood. I thought it might be fun to flip the script a little and instead of writing about a poor young girl, write about a donut obsessed man child. As you can tell I stayed very close to Mayhew’s sentence structure as well as content to try and achieve the most comedic return. I heavily used commas in my parody as I found that Mayhew seems to prefer to use commas and join more thoughts as opposed to separating them into individual sentences.

I found that Mayhew’s use of speech as well as his interpretation of the girl’s actions, reactions, and general behavior was particularly effective in trying to capture the essence of his character. I found this technique very helpful in my parody, as speech is one of the fastest ways to portray a character to the reader. I also tried to stay true to the errors in that occurred in the speech to present the piece as Mayhew did as an unhampered piece of journalism. This was especially helpful considering I only had about five hundred words to play