Summary Of Me Talk Pretty One Day By David Sedaris

Non-fiction essay

The essay “Me talk pretty one day” by David Sedaris from 2005 is an essay on the subject of learning a foreign language. The essay is centred on Sedaris’s personal experience of attempting to learn French, and the trouble that came with it, as he was cursed with a teacher whose idea of an educational environment included draconian punishments for even the smallest mistake, personal attacks, and even the occasional bit of physical harm. Seems this teacher believes mistakes will disappear if her students fear making them in the first place. After all if making a mistake results in you getting a pencil stuffed in your eye you would probably avoid making mistake, or at least I should think so.

The essay is about the experience of Sedaris as a 41-year old English native speaker attempting to learn French in Paris, after a month long French course in New York. Once classes start the students learns that his teacher teaches in a rather cruel manner. From the very beginning the seemingly ma-levolent teacher criticizes and berates even the smallest mistake, to the point where Sedaris is afraid to speak a single word of French, in fair and certainty that it is wrong, and in the end what was sup-posed to be a good class, became a

After being berated for every little mistake, and spending enormous amounts of time preparing for class, Sedaris stops making mistakes, but only because he has become too scared to speak up. Eventually this fear even carries on from the classroom to the rest of his life, (”My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards”, p. 2, ll. 98-99). In the end of the essay Sedaris states: (”Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus”, p. 3 l. 128). The meaning of this is unclear, as it might mean that he has grown resilient enough to ignore the teacher’s abuse, or that he has had his moral shattered so utterly and complete-ly that he has just given