The world today is full of writers that have different styles of writing. My style of writing of way different than Stephen Kings style of writing. David Sedaris is a unique writer. When I read Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa I notice his style of writing. I learned several things from Sedaris, which will help me in the future.
David Sedaris has a great way of using elaboration. Elaboration is like his secret weapon against readers. Sedaris shows me images by using elaboration words. Images such as when the man has rotten goat meat inside his mouth. The word that he uses in the text to describe the man is wrinkled. The sentence tells me that the man is old and full of wrinkles.
There is another scene in the essays that has great use of image text. When the students are at the slaughterhouse and the goat is about to be executed by the man. I can see that the goat is about to be killed but in an execution style. When the execution is done, he uses freshly slaughter to describe the goat and to offer some to the students. Sedaris creates images throughout the whole essay. I can see what elaboration does to a story of any sort. Elaborating will keep my readers attention throughout all my stories.
When an author writes, he must have the readers attention. Sedaris has a small weakness in this essay. The weakness of losing readers while reading the essay. The teacher surveyed the class. The question the teacher asked was How many of you stop reading after a particular scene? The results were negative; most of the class answered that they did stop reading after a couple of paragraphs.
The reason they stopped reading was that they were grossed out with all the gruesome and disgusting scenes that he had implemented. When I saw how many people stopped reading. I did not want my readers to end up in that way. I know that I should be able to keep my readers by writing realistic scenes. I do not want my readers to be sick. I want my readers to have fun and enjoy my piece of writing.
David Sedaris uses a narrator to tell this story. Narrating is also and important element in the world of writing. I can use a narrator to tell my stories and not have to be in 1st person all the time. There are a lot of people that when they read they get lost. If I use a narrator I can help them by leading them with my words. I can also use a narrator to tell jokes like in the Disney Movies with Mickey Mouse.
There are different ways of using the narrator in my stories. I can be one of the characters telling the story like in Sedaris story or I can just be a plain narrator that only knows the story but is not in the story itself. David Sedaris uses his character in a good way to narrorate his story. His narrator is the friend of the character Hugh. He also participates in different ways. I will try to use a narrator in the future whenever I am writing story.
I have learned a lot from reading David Sedaris. He uses great elaboration in his story, which is a good thing. However, he does not contain his readers towards the end of the story, and uses a narrator to tell his story, I read Sedaris and I learned new things from him. His knowledge will help me in the future.
