From the tiniest punctuation to the nice flow of sentences, Harvey’s book “The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing” pinpoints the main fundamentals and ideas of this type of writing. David Sedaris wrote “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, which is a novel that has a structure that very well follows the structure and ideas of Harvey. Sedaris’s narrative includes a gracefulness, flow, and clarity recognizable from Harvey’s novel.

The gracefulness of Sedaris’s piece is almost unexpected due to the title, “Me Talk Pretty One Day”. It may be expected to have many errors or even a strange dialect. However, the narrative is read simply and with ease. For example, he uses the sentence, “The teacher marched in, deeply tanned from a recent vacation, and proceeded to rattle off a series of administrative announcements,” with a strong purpose and meaning, but it still contains that simplistic ease (Sedaris). As Harvey says, “Words matter,” and that is easily displayed by this one sentence and all throughout the work of Sedaris (Harvey 5). 

It is, also, clear that there is a motion to the way the narrative is written. The flow of an essay helps moves the piece “from point A to point B”, and this is important when writing a solid essay like the one Sedaris has provided (Harvey 3). Sedaris is telling his story in a way that is quite intriguing to read because the sentences flow. He describes his teacher and his learning, and in doing so makes it flow together to create his piece. For example, “The teacher, through word and action, conveyed the message that if this was my idea of an identity, she wanted nothing to do with it,” and then he continues on to say, “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards” (Sedaris). The two sentences flow and make sense together, easily.

Harvey uses the words “competent, disciplined plainness” to describe his idea of clarity. Clarity can be described as the ease at which the audience reads the work. Again, Sedaris uses a clear tone for the audience that decides to read his narrative. In fact, his whole narrative has a little bit to do with clarity because in his classroom there was little instruction that he understood. He describes what this means while saying, “Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxication and deceptive” (Sedaris). This sentence itself helps defines clarity, and the words and structure remain clear as well. 

Many of the ideas that Sedaris does quite well involve simplicity and ease, which are, also, what Harvey includes in his novel. Gracefulness, flow, and clarity all fall under the category of reading with ease, and the two writers work hand-in-hand to display this.