Extra Credit
Hin Yau
Jeung/McDonald
Writing for College
26 July 2010
Extra Credit
Write a paragraph of your own thoughts on this thing that you read.
I have read the first three pages of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. The first two pages of the book have citations, but the third page doesn’t. As a read a lot, I find that this book is really hard to read although I read it several times. The first impression that Wallace gives me is wordiness. First of all, he uses three and a half page to write his first sentence. It irritates me a lot that I don’t even understand the first sentence. Secondly, he uses a lot of phrases in the first sentence. He glorifies a “fifty-six-year old American poet” with numerous awards and good reputation in the society (1). He writes the word “fifty-six” three times in his first sentence (1-3). I respect his style of writing, but I think that the readers would also feel annoyed while reading this book.
Write a paragraph about how DFW uses footnotes.
There are two citations in the three pages. Wallace uses his first citation to give additional information about “the home’s kidney-shaped pool” (1). He describes that the first American-born poet of Nobel Prize for Literature also received it. The second citation is behind the phrase “reading Newsweek magazine” (2). He also gives additional information about “the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship” (2). I don’t think that information is very useful to the text.
Works Cited
Wallace, David Foster. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Back Bay, 2000. 1-3. Print.
