Summary Of Me Talk Pretty One Day By David Sedaris

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” These limits are apparent in David Sedaris’ essay Me Talk Pretty One Day, where he addresses the challenges associated with learning a second language through personal experience. Although Sedaris breaks Orwell’s rule, “never use a metaphor…which you are used to seeing in print,” he does so effectively throughout the text. Additionally, an easy to follow method of organization and his appeal to Ethos and Pathos allows the reader to easily relate to his experiences.

Sedaris uses a variety of dying metaphors throughout his essay to convey numerous ideas. First, Sedaris describes the French program in Paris as “everybody [in] the language pool,

The essay begins with him introducing himself at the age of forty one, beginning his endeavor of learning French in Paris. He guides the reader through the first day of class, where he shows up early and eager to learn. He touches on his inability to recite the alphabet and the difficulties he has expressing his like for reading about skin conditions due to his limited French vocabulary. At this point in the essay most of the teacher’s words are written as a compilation of random letters indicating that he doesn’t understand all that is being said. The audience then begins to understand the challenges that occur on the first day due to the limited understanding of the students. Sedaris takes the audience into the following months where his classmates learned to “dodge chalk and protect [their] heads” whenever the teacher asked a question. In addition to this, he describes that after being singled out as a “lazy kfdtinvfin” he spent countless hours doing homework in an attempt to create an “identity” for himself. Aside from this, Sedaris explained that he took comfort in the fact that he wasn’t alone, through his newfound friends the reader sees that each of them has difficulty putting together a sentence that makes sense grammatically. Near the end of the text it was mid-October, and the insults continued to come from the teacher however, this