...diversity, and absolutely no need for it. We were all white, so wasn’t it all right? I was young, but not too young to remember the dreadful feeling of conformity itself squishing my insides together, to be more like the line leader, Sally Johnson. Thankfully, the move to Texas is what put steel wedges between conformity and me. I’m realizing now, that moving to Texas secretly always felt like a bittersweet, new beginning. Mostly bitter because I was leaving the only life 10-year-old me knew - cul de sac soccer, freshly fallen snow early Christmas morning, and mountains that begged my return the second I left. Sweet because well, it was a chance to change that all, and discover a side...
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...Early in the summer of 2013, I already started going in summer classes for 10thgrade because it is the most crucial grade in India. It essentially determines your future. Then suddenly I got an interview call from the United States Embassy. I was glad, but at the same time I was nervous too. An interview was about my family, the officer asked me some general question like what your mother does for a living? Why do you want to go to the United States? How many brothers/sister you have? After some days my family decided we are going to move to the United States. We moved around in mid-August. On the next day, my father took me to the school to get admission, I like the school's infrastructure and the school was huge. After some school days started...
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...Waking up one day and unable to feel or move your leg could be one of the scariest conditions that could ever happen to you. You went to sleep able to run, walk, jump, and to function in the fast-paced world, but what if you forced to start over, reteach yourself how to do all of those motions again. That was what was required of me in order to survive. I woke up, one cold December morning, with no feeling in my entire right leg because I just had surgery on my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). I was unable to move my leg without some outside assistance. Life at that point was difficult. Knowing that I was going to relearn everything that I used to be able to do was an inevitable challenge. Everything I went through to be able to function in the fast-paced world is an analogy for how babies learn to walk for the first time....
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...PERSONAL NARRATIVE 1 When taking a look at how my life has changed over the past five years I can truly and honestly say that I would never have expected the things that have happened. Back in June 2007 I was separated from my husband and moved into my own apartment. I was in the United States Navy for six and a half years at that time. My divorce was finalized in January 2008 and I deployed to Afghanistan in March 2008, for eight months. After coming home from a long deployment, I had orders to move to Lemoore, California. This area is nothing but farm lands and I did not like that at all. I was born and raised in Southern California and enjoyed the fast-paced life that I was living. It is amazing how things have changed. In July 2011 I was honorably discharged from the United States Navy and I moved back in with my mother and two younger sister. Growing up we lived in a condo in Diamond Bar, California, but that all changed over time. The same time that I got out of the military, myself, my sisters and my mother had to move out of our condo and into a two bedroom apartment. Talk about a huge change in life. This move has not been easy for any of us. There is no privacy and we all have to share the living space. I share a bed with my middle sister and my mother shares a bed with my youngest sister. I never thought that I would be unemployed for this long, but it has been over a year since I got discharged. It seems like nobody is hiring right now...
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...__verbatim ___ summaries of conversations ___provided by a parent • Q & A are listed by universal aspects of culture (i.e. categories) • Nearly all questions were asked/ responses are provided for all questions • Responses provide sufficient data for the other parts of the ethnography • A rich narrative is provided within the answers; thoughtfulness is clearly exhibited • Personal Interview/ Parent Interview/ Grandparent Interview Completed |Rating |Exceeds Standards |Meets Standards |Approaches |Insufficient Evidence; D or | | |A+, A |A-, B+, B |B-, C+, C, C- |below | |Content |1. Asked and answered |1. Asked and answered |1. Asked and answered |1. Asked and answered | | |questions reveal tremendous |questions reveal family |questions reveal family |questions are lacking in many | | |depth and provide a rich |narrative |details |respects...
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...Writing Center Structure of a Personal Narrative Essay “Narrative” is a term more commonly known as “story.” Narratives written for college or personal narratives, tell a story, usually to some point, to illustrate some truth or insight. Following are some tools to help you structure your personal narrative, breaking it down into parts. The “Hook” Start your paper with a statement about your story that catches the reader’s attention, for example: a relevant quotation, question, fact, or definition. Introduction Set the Scene Provide the information the reader will need to understand the story: Who are the major characters? When and where is it taking place? Is it a story about something that happened to you, the writer, or is it fiction? Thesis Statement The thesis of a narrative essay plays a slightly different role than that of an argument or expository essay. A narrative thesis can begin the events of the story: “It was sunny and warm out when I started down the path”; offer a moral or lesson learned: “I’ll never hike alone again”; or identify a theme that connects the story to a universal experience: “Journeys bring both joy and hardship.” “Show, Don’t Tell” Good story telling includes details and descriptions that help the reader understand what the writer experienced. Think about using all five senses—not just the sense of sight—to add details about what you heard, saw, and felt during the event. For example, “My heart jumped as the dark shape...
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...CLRC Writing Center Structure of a Personal Narrative Essay “Narrative” is a term more commonly known as “story.” Narratives written for college or personal narratives, tell a story, usually to some point, to illustrate some truth or insight. Following are some tools to help you structure your personal narrative, breaking it down into parts. The “Hook” Start your paper with a statement about your story that catches the reader’s attention, for example: a relevant quotation, question, fact, or definition. Set the Scene Provide the information the reader will need to understand the story: Who are the major characters? When and where is it taking place? Is it a story about something that happened to you, the writer, or is it fiction? Thesis Statement The thesis of a narrative essay plays a slightly different role than that of an argument or expository essay. A narrative thesis can begin the events of the story: “It was sunny and warm out when I started down the path”; offer a moral or lesson learned: “I’ll never hike alone again”; or identify a theme that connects the story to a universal experience: “Journeys bring both joy and hardship.” “Show, Don’t Tell” Good story telling includes details and descriptions that help the reader understand what the writer experienced. Think about using all five senses—not just the sense of sight—to add details about what you heard, saw, and felt during the event. For example, “My heart jumped as the dark shape of the brown grizzly lurched...
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...Nothing in 500 Words by Paul Roberts, an essay, discusses common mistakes made by college freshmen in academic writing. During my semester of Intro to Expository Writing, my academic writing has greatly improved. My writing started as “Elementary school was like a fairytale; there was a pretty princess and a handsome prince, but I was an evil villain.” And has grown to “Through her diction, Walls creates various tones in order to convey to her audience that despite obstacles, it is possible to escape from a dysfunctional family in hopes of a brighter future.” Using How to Say Nothing in 500 Words, I will be evaluating my own writing by discussing my strengths, weaknesses, and how I have grown as a writer. Writing narratives have always been a personal struggle for me. Unless I passionately come up with a story, and immediately write it on paper, my narratives are bland. It is hard to write personal life-changing stories when I have a deadline. One weakness of mine is using colorful words. For example, a sentence from my personal narrative was written as “It was magnificent with its stained green carpet and plenty of wooden bookshelves stocked with colorful books.” In retrospect, this is how it could have been written, “The spacious library had wooden bookshelves stuffed with leather-bound books, which rested on gritty emerald carpet.”...
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...I would categorize my senior year as one of wild progression when it came to my writing. Senior year mirrors my sophomore year almost exactly when it comes to just pure progression. In that sophomore year, I greatly improved in an area that had irked me for years, the organization of content, and I grew in other critical areas throughout the course of this year. While I would consider my writing far more refined than it was in 10th grade, there are still multiple core elements that I always work to improve. The first few journals last semester echoed the thoughts of a teen who refused to take risks in his writing, who couldn’t be told his faults without a fear of personal attack. Last year the majority of my writing was for AP courses, and...
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...described [and] which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of traumatic neurosis’ (12). Freud’s remark brings to the fore the traumas of the industrial age as both individually and publicly experienced and negotiated. This condition of trauma as private and public, individual yet also societal is held in tension throughout Cunningham’s novel. Reflecting on the otherness of trauma and its vexed relationship to representation, this article will consider some aspects of the writing of trauma in Michael Cunningham’s 2005 novel Specimen Days; a text that offers a particularly powerful literary imaging of culture’s disavowals that return to haunt. In my discussion of Cunningham’s engagement with trauma, and in particular social and ‘insidious’ forms of trauma, the main concerns will be firstly how the text...
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...Through narrative therapy a counselor can help clients gain access to preferred story lines about their lives and identities taking the place of previous negative and self-defeating narratives that destroy the self. Presented in this paper, is an overview of the Narrative therapy and the Social Construction Model and several facets of this approach including poststrucuralism, deconstructionism, self-narratives, cultural narratives, therapeutic conversations, ceremonies, letters and leagues. A personal integration of faith in this family counseling approach is presented and discussed also in this paper. NARUMI AMADOR’S FAMILY CONSELING APPROACH Introduction Narrative therapy is found under the Social Construction Model. Using the Narrative approach, the therapist will not be the central figure in the therapeutic process, instead he will be influential to the client, helping him/her internalize and create new stories within themselves to draw new and healthier assumptions about who they are. This process enables clients to distract from focusing on the negative narratives which defined their past, redefining their lives into future positive stories. Narrative therapists define the problem as the problem instead of defining the client as the problem. The therapy process begins redefining the problem, externalizing it and getting it out in the open. The narrative therapist uses the questioning technique and creates alternative narratives to connect...
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...N I N G O B J E C T I V E S 10 1. Identify the purpose and structure of narrative writing. 2. Recognize how to write a narrative essay. Rhetorical modes simply mean the ways in which we can effectively communicate through language. This chapter covers nine common rhetorical modes. As you read about these nine modes, keep in mind that the rhetorical mode a writer chooses depends on his or her purpose for writing. Sometimes writers incorporate a variety of modes in one essay. In covering the nine rhetorical modes, this chapter also emphasizes these as a set of tools that will allow you greater flexibility and effectiveness in communicating with your audience and expressing your ideas. rhetorical modes The ways in which we effectively communicate through language. 1.1 The Purpose of Narrative Writing Narration means the art of storytelling, and the purpose of narrative writing is to tell stories. Any time you tell a story to a friend or family member about an event or incident in your day, you engage in a form of narration. In addition, a narrative can be factual or fictional. A factual story is one that is based on, and tries to be faithful to, actual events as they unfolded in real life. A fictional story is a made-up, or imagined, story; the writer of a fictional story can create characters and events as he or she sees fit. However, the big distinction between factual and fictional narratives is based on a writer’s purpose. The writers of factual stories try to recount...
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...Africa through Theatre This paper sets out to explore how processes of theatre making employed by The Mothertongue project, provide spaces for women to remap their personal narratives. Mothertongue works from the premise that the development and subsequent performance of stories in theatrical processes affords women the opportunity to re-write and remap their personal narratives and in so doing insert their voices into the landscape of South African Theatre. In an attempt to redress the gender imbalances and androcentricism prevalent in post-apartheid theatre, this paper speaks to the relationship between theatre, liminality and communitas. I am interested in unpacking how collaborative processes of theatre-making provide spaces for women to remap their personal narratives. Remapping in this instance refers to processes of transforming lived experience through story. I address how, through engaging in ritual activities that are central to the stories performed, actors, audiences and the owners of the source stories are invited to physically participate in remapping and transforming lived experience. Linked to this is the choice of form(s) and how this affects or impacts on the performed stories as well as on the construction of performed rituals and ultimately on the processes of remapping personal narratives. I focus specifically on Mothertongue’s 2004 production, Uhambo: pieces of a dream. The production was an integration of theatre and visual art in the form of performances...
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...The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes I want to challenge two linked assumptions that most historians and critics of the English novel share. The first is that the burgeoning of capitalism and the ascension of the middle classes were mainly responsible for the development of the novel. The second is that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition. [note 1] I want to propose instead that, as surely as it marked a response to developing class relations, the novel came into being as a response to the sex-gender system that emerged in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [note 2] My thesis is that from its inception, the novel has been structured not by one but by two mutually defining traditions: the fantastic and the realistic. [note 3] The constitutive coexistence of these two impulses within a single, evolving form is in no sense accidental: their dynamic interaction was precisely the means by which the novel, from the eighteenth century on, sought to manage the strains and contradictions that the sex-gender system imposed on individual subjectivities. For this reason, to recover the centrality of sex and gender as the novel's defining concern is also to recover the dynamism of its bimodal complexity. Conversely, to explore the interplay of realist and fantastic narratives within the novelistic tradition is to explore the indeterminacy of subjectivities engaged in the task of imposing and rebelling against the constraining order of gender difference. ...
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...title of the short story is "Crossing" And this title is up to what the story is about. My interpretation of this story is that the message is to rebuild trust in relationships can be difficult. The main character tries so hard to rebuild his relationship with his son by making him trust him when the cross the river. Because it could happen that he slips on the rocks in the river, so actually the son let his life depends on a trust to his father. The main character is a man who has a young son and he were married once. The text does not tell us directly that he is divorced but there are things that leads up to the fact that he was for example, it says on page 1 line 15 “For a long time he hadn't wanted her back”. This tells us that he is separated from a woman but not that they are divorced. Another example could be when he looks at the yard page 1 line 14 “the azaleas he'd planted” This tells us that he once had lived there and planted an azaleas. Based on these facts about the man I would guess that he is around his thirties. The main character has hope for getting his son’s trust back and therefore he arranges a trip to an old barn across the river. The main character is the one who has destroyed the relationship with his wife because on page 4 line 135 is says, “My God, All his other fuckups were just preparations for this.” The main character has no name in the story and there is no personal description of him. Instead, there is a lot more focus on his thoughts and he is also...
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