When I first started reading this essay, some things just didn't sound right. As I kept on reading, it didn't exactly get better, but it didn't get worse. Sedaris followed some things from Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, but not everything. I feel as though he added commas where there shouldn't have been. Such as the second sentence. "After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theatres, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwhich." (Sedaris 1). The comma pair he uses doesn't work here. In Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, Harvery notes that "the pair of commas works rather like parentheses to mark the beginning and end." (Harvey 36). The commas Sedaris uses confused me and made the sentence hard to read. Harvey also wrote that you should use quotations when writing words in a different language and Sedaris uses italics instead of quotations. For the most part Sedaris' essay was well written and had flow, but I didn't really understand the message behind it completely.
You have not gone into any depth at all here, ignoring many applicable topics in Harvey and choosing instead to talk only about punctuation. Your remarks on punctuation are not entirely correct, either--I think that you struggled as a reader, here.
ReplyDeleteThis post feels kind of rushed. I think it could be much improved if you had spent a little more time on it. It starts out with an overview that makes it seem like you are going to talk about the content of the essay, not just punctuation. Your conclusion also makes it seem like you talked about other things other than punctuation. Also, I did notice that Sedaris had a different way of using punctuation, but I don't think his way was wrong. His style might just be different from Harvey's. After all, Sedaris is not writing papers for college. He is writing for entertainment.
ReplyDeleteFor this post, I think you could have addressed Sedaris' use of punch lines or word choice. There is a lot going on in his essay and in Harvey's book that you haven't touched on yet, and these things could be emphasized and explained through textual evidence and warrants.