These are the ways that Sedaris uses pathos in his writing in order to convey his experience in school with more empathy.Īlong with pathos, Sedaris also uses imagery in his book as another rhetoric technique. He goes on to say how the teacher threw chalk at the students and the rest of the students were scared that she might punch one of them sooner or later. He uses pathos in order to get the sympathy of the reader to make them feel bad for him while he is in the class. In the book he states “I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand,”, “The teacher proceed to belittle everyone”, and “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom.” In these quotes Sedaris shows how much his teacher bullied him and his other classmates and how much it hurt him to be there. He uses this as an opportunity in the book for the reader to feel pity for him because he doesn’t know how to speak French while the rest of the class does.

One instance when he uses pathos is in the second part of the book when he is in school learning French and gets bullied by the teacher. Throughout the book Sedaris uses many rhetorical devices such as pathos.

These are some of the ways that Sedaris follows some of Zinsser’s advice in order to make the book more interesting. This sentence is not one that you might usually find to be normal, which makes the reader want to find out more about what really happened to Hugh and why that would be considered a normal class trip for fifth graders. One of the most memorable sentences that Sedaris wrote to start a chapter was “When Hugh was in the fifth grade, his class took a field trip to the Ethiopian slaughterhouse.” This shows one example of how Sedaris drags the reader into the story. Every new chapter started discussing a new phase in the characters life and each began with a sentence that would make the reader finish the chapter before putting the book down. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.” Sedaris uses a hook to drag in a reader within the first sentence to continue reading to the next one and considering the entire book is short stories, Sedaris manages to create this for every single one of them. He states that “The most important sentence in any article is the first one. One example of this was the chapter that Zinsser was discussing how a nonfiction novel should start off. Based on many of Zinsser’s writings, “Me Talk Pretty One Day” was an effective book.

David sedaris me talk pretty