Final Short Takes Post

For this final post on pieces from "Short Takes", I read "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris, "The Ghetto Girl's Guide to Dating and Romance" by Sonja Livingston, and "Bullet in My Neck" by Gerald Stern. All three of these pieces were very well written and had a lot of detail, and they all related to one another because they all dealt with struggles. Different types of struggles, but struggles none the less. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" was about a student's struggle to speak French while studying in Paris, and I thought that this piece really did a good job at describing his struggles in such a short essay. "The Ghetto Girl's Guide to Dating and Romance" I turned to this essay expecting it to be somewhat humorous, since the title sounded like it would be. However, it was far from it and dealt with an incredibly serious subject. I really did like how she took such a heavy topic and wrote about it in a list-like form instead of just a straight narrative essay, so I think that the format really worked for this piece. In "Bullet In My Neck", Gerald Stern talks about how he got the bullet in his neck due to a shooting. In this short take, Stern writes more about his feelings about the event more than what actually happened,  I would have to say that I would like to know more about what happened in that specific moment in time. As far as how these all connect, they are not so much similar in structure as they are in subject. As I stated before, these three essays are about some sort of struggle or tragic event, and even though the events are all very different each one captures the idea of the inner thoughts, feelings, and emotions that come with various types of tragedies and hardships. These are all great examples of creative nonfiction because they do this, and also because they state the raw facts themselves to tell the story, especially in "The Ghetto Girl's Guide to Dating and Romance". I did notice that these essays seemed to have a similar tone, a tone that educates the reader about what happened, yet used lots of creative language to tell each of their stories. "Ghetto Girl's Guide" had a much more serious tone than the other two due to its intense subject along with having no dialogue, however "Me Talk Pretty One Day" and "Bullet in My Neck" had a very similar tone and structure, using dialogue and paragraphs, rather than list structure. I hope that someday I can learn to master that list-style essay like Livingston though, because even though it wasn't structured like a standard essay, it was still very deep, detailed, and most of all powerful, and I hope that I can learn to write like that.