As you continue your revision, try experimenting with the order of your narrative. For details, see the notes on narrative order included below (and on your revision handout). Also consider how “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Day Language Came into My Life” demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. Together, David Sedaris’s essay and Helen Keller’s chapter show us that the stories we recount—for our purposes, ones of learning to read or write, or speak a second language—may be humorous or serious and may consist primarily of scene or may be composed of roughly equal parts scene and summary.
Temporal Distance and the Adult Retrospective Narrator
Sedaris’s and Keller’s stories show us two narrators whose temporal distance from their narratives differ significantly. In “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” Sedaris recounts struggling to learn French “[a]t the age of forty-one” (166). His essay, published in Esquire magazine when he was forty-three, chronicles an experience only two years in his past. In contrast, Keller writes of the life-altering experience of learning sign language “three months before I was seven years old” (par. 1), more than fifteen years before she published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903). The term for a narrator looking back at childhood, as Keller does, is adult retrospective narrator.
Chronological and Nonlinear Narratives
Consider experimenting with the order of your narrative. Many of your drafts were chronological—and ultimately you may decide that suits your story best—but try one of these nonlinear approaches.
- Beginning your narrative in the present, then depicting the experience in one or more flashbacks
- Starting in medias res (in the middle of things), then turning to exposition to explain how the story arrived at that point
Diction, Mechanics, Grammar, and Style
The August 19 blog entry includes a bullet-point list of notes on diction, mechanics, grammar, and style, a list also included on the handout you received when I returned your introductory reflective writing. If you have not reviewed that list, be sure to do so before you post your final revision to Blackboard and WordPress.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Word Finder page, and review your journal notes on the game and the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.
Jane Lucas 