...My first paper was a little rocky. At first I could not settle with a topic. When I would start to write a paper I would think it was not good enough and change it to something else. I changed my paper three different times. It was just hard for me to get started and it was also hard narrowing down my topic because I felt like what I was talking about was so broad. Turns out when I finally picked my topic my paper was headed in all the wrong directions. I ended up having to change a lot of things. When I went to Professor Warfield’s office hours it did help me but I was still a little discouraged that I would never get my paper right. I am still trying to keep a positive mind frame and I am hoping for the best with my grade. Overall I learned...
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...Sorrows: Mothertongue Transforming Spaces Occupied by Women in South 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...
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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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...Which Essay is Better: A Narrative or A Descriptive? Ever read a story and say to yourself, “What’s happening?” Whenever I read a descriptive essay, that’s what I would say. In this essay I would be comparing and contrasting two types of essays, a narrative and descriptive. I have chosen “Are the rich happy?” by Stephen Leacock 1916 and “Sister Flowers” by Maya Angelou, n.d. By writing my essay, I want to give my views on each and decide which I would rather write. Narrative Essay A narrative essay reflects a personal opinion that is based on your own experiences. This helps you bring a reader into your very own mind and shows him/her the topic you’re writing about through your eyes. Telling a story or event the way it happened for you. It also could provide a sort of lesson or moral to be learned from the outcome of the story as well as what the writer did that contributed to it or not. It’s more on a personal level that any one reading could say that happened to them or that they learned from the story by not doing whatever it was that the writer did. In Stephen Leacock’s “Are the Rich Happy?” the author writes about his experiences with his friends, with of modest income. Most of it, all in his opinion, points out the problems or troubles those with an existential amount of funds in their bank accounts. He goes on to give some examples that he encountered several of his friends going through. “A friend of mine who has ten thousand dollars a year told me the other...
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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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...Writing a Literacy Narrative A literacy narrative is telling a story. To be exact, it is giving an account of an experience, most likely a personal one, which tells about a time when reading and/or writing helped you to learn something significant. The main idea of a literacy narrative is to speak about a time you were able to learn and grow from a specific experience. When writing any sort of essay or paper, it is always necessary to do the following: Pick a topic that you feel very strongly about but are willing to share. Title your paper (something suitable to your topic) Engage the reader (“Show” the reader rather than “telling” the reader.) Give vivid descriptions throughout the essay. Use sensory details, such as what you see, smell, touch, etc. Include dialogue, but use it sparingly. Dialogue is most effective when it is only used for key moments. Remember to punctuate dialogue correctly. For example: “I don’t know what happened, but I’m not going to give up,” Jasmine said. Know that an important tool in narratives is imagery, which can be defined as visually descriptive language. These details are important because recalling a day such as this shows it’s importance to you, allowing the reader somewhat of an emotional connection to the event. This method is called reflecting. Whenever you’re writing an essay that involves something from you past, it is vital that you ask yourself these following questions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What...
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...Mrs. Phelps introduced her class with at the start of my junior year. I had always been keen to free writing for the single reason that it was easy to fluff up and fabricate. As long as it was in MLA format and grammar was correct, I could not lose. I had discovered early on in my academic career that I was a decent writer; I could establish main points and a theme as well as apply proper grammar. It speaks for my writing that I was agitable to misusers of “there, their, and they’re” to say the least. The only criticism on writing prompts I would get were technical ones, like using apostrophes incorrectly or writing the number rather than spelling it. Yet, marked in red at the top of my first paper junior year was something I had not expected, nor seen before-- “Where is your voice?” My voice? I was not mute, so what kind of question was that? I thought about it all class period and looked for the flaw within the paper. All i had to work with was that obscure note and I thought about the question again and again-- I even began...
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...call his name. In this poem, identity is not seen as something that is solid and concrete but as something that is situated and constructed by others, a glimpse of poststructuralist view on identity. Recently, language learning has been seen as participation and negotiation of self (see Higgins, forthcoming; Kinginger, 2004; Lam, 2000; Morita, 2004; Ohara, 2001; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; and Solé, 2007 among others). The trend is resonated in the growing interest in language learner identity and the studies in narratives. In this paper, a case of heritage language learner will be investigated upon the theoretical frame of poststructuralism. Narrative inquiry will be used to analyze how she negotiates her learner identity. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: First, by looking at the struggle a language learner makes to acquire her heritage language, I reclaim the centrality of identity in defining heritage language learners. Second, to widen the horizons of narrative studies to the cyber space as it provides an ample source of easily accessible data and it has become one of the commonplace media of daily communication. Heritage Language Learners and Identity To refer to the Heritage Language Learners (HLLs), various terms have been implemented such as ‘native speakers,’ ‘quasi native speakers,’ ‘bilingual speakers,’ or, from the dissatisfaction with the prior terms, ‘home background speakers,’ and ‘heritage language speakers’ (Valés, 2005: p. 412). There has not yet been...
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...Graded Assignments 4 Unit 1 Journal 1: Personal Narrative 4 Unit 1 Journal 1: Personal Narrative Handout 6 Unit 1 Journal 2: Civic Narrative 9 Unit 1 Journal 2: Civic Narrative Handout 11 Unit 1 Assignment 1: What Would You Do? 12 Unit 2 Journal 1: Personal Narrative 13 Unit 2 Journal 1: Personal Narrative Handout 15 Unit 2 Journal 2: Civic Narrative 19 Unit 2 Journal 2: Civic Narrative Handout 20 Unit 2 Journal 3: Article Response 22 Unit 2 Assignment 1: What Would You Do? 23 Unit 2 Assignment 2: Declaration of Independence and Public Safety 25 Unit 3 Journal 1: Car Commercials 26 Unit 3 Journal 2: Personal Narrative 27 Unit 3 Journal 2: Personal Narrative Handout 28 Unit 3 Journal 3: Civic Narrative 31 Unit 3 Journal 3: Civic Narrative Handout 32 Unit 3 Journal 4: Taste vs. Judgment 34 Unit 3 Presentation 1: What Would You Do? 35 Unit 3 Assignment 1: Habits That Hinder Thinking 36 Unit 4 Journal 1: Invention Exercise 37 Unit 4 Journal 1: SWOT Analysis Template 38 Unit 4 Journal 2: Personal Narrative 39 Unit 4 Journal 2: Personal Narrative Handout 41 Unit 4 Journal 3: Civic Narrative 43 Unit 4 Journal 3: Civic Narrative Handout 44 Unit 4 Assignment 1: What Would You Do? 46 Unit 4 Assignment 2: Invention White Paper 47 Unit 5 Journal 1: Personal Narrative 48 Unit 5 Journal 1: Personal Narrative Handout 49 Unit 5 Journal 2: Civic Narrative 51 Unit 5 Journal 2: Civic Narrative Handout 53 Unit 5 Assignment 1: What Would...
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...erian novelJournal of Education and Practice ISSN 2222-1735 (Paper) ISSN 2222-288X (Online) Vol 2, No 4, 2011 www.iiste.org A Study on Gender Consciousness in Nigerian Autobiographical Narratives and Power of the Interview Ogunyemi, Christopher Babatunde Department of English, College of Humanities, Joseph Ayo Babalola University PMB 5006 Ilesa 233001 Osun State, Nigeria. bbcoguns2@yahoo.se Akindutire, Isaac Olusola Department of Physical and Health Education, Faculty of Education University of Ado Ekiti Ado Ekiti. Ekiti State, Nigeria ioakindutire@yahoo.com Adelakun, Ojo Johnson Department of Economics, Joseph Ayo Babalola University, PMB 5006 Ilesa 233001, Osun State, Nigeria joadelakun@yahoo.co.uk Abstract The study explores some self-created metaphors in male autobiographical writings in Nigeria. It visualizes the negation of female gender in art. The paper investigates the dichotomy of language, the use of irony and situational metaphors to displace conventional ones; it blends theories with critical evaluation of discourse. The research uses empirical methods in solving hypothetical questions with the use of extensive and relatively unstructured interviews. It examines the interviews of twenty five people independently, these people include: University lecturers, students, administrative and technical staff. The work analyzes concurrently their interview testimonies to search for congruence. Data analysis begins with a detailed microanalysis in which emergent concepts...
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...have been able to improve on those things. The improvements came about from the different type of essays that we had to write and it brought a whole lot of strengths from it. Although in the past years we have learned on how to write a lot of these papers this year we dove a little more into them. We took different approaches to them to get more out of them than we had before, such as the personal narrative. I have written a personal narrative in the past but this time it helped me improve because i could not just be basic. I learned that i would have to write more in detail for it be a quality paper, that i couldn’t just get away with writing it like a 9th grader any more. The improvement was just as small as having to do with the intro and getting better with my attention getters. It benefitted me because we have to write intos in all of our papers and if you write an intro that can’t grab the attention, no one...
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...invention Commercial Break!!: Creative Play With Media Influence Purpose: Works well to introduce a personal visual media paper, or other media analysis paper, because it encourages students to think critically about their childhood experiences with TV, etc in a personal, creative way. The exercise may become an early paper draft, or simply stimulate their thinking about the programs and commercials they have watched, and how these media affected them. Description: Students will write creative narratives about a childhood TV experience, then trade papers with another classmate, who will assess the program, the narrator, and then complete the narrative with a commercial break description suited to the program and audience. You may want to have your own example written up to read to them before each step, just to get them thinking about what’s possible. Suggested Time: 20 minutes to a full class period Procedure: Ask the class what their favorite shows were as kids: cartoons, sitcoms, even documentaries. You may want to bring in a few stills or uTube clips to project (in a tech class), as a memory jogger (ex. The Cosby Show, Ren & Stimpy, etc). Once you’ve discussed a nice variety of TV programs, ask the class to freewrite for 5-10 minutes (however long you wish to tell them) in first-person P.O.V. about their experience watching a show like these as a kid. They should be specific and detailed, writing whatever comes to memory about what’s going on in the program and their thoughts/reactions/and...
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...Pedagogical Possibilities of Covering Gilman’s Wallpaper Karla J. Murphy In his introduction to The Pedagogical Wallpaper, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock notes how the pedagogical diversity of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” prompted him to collect essays for this book. He goes on to explain that “given the ubiquity of the text within various academic settings, I was also struck by the absence of attention to the text within pedagogical contexts. Despite the large (and steadily growing) body of criticism to the story, very little of it explicitly addresses its importance as a tool to facilitate learning or various ways in which to make use of the text in the classroom” (3). As a collection, Weinstock’s The Pedagogical Wallpaper contains informed, detailed, and diverse analysis that attempts to shore up the absence of “pedagogical possibilities” concerning Gilman’s transgressive short story (9). Among the contributors are a MOO space specialist, a Gilman scholar, a queer theorist, an existentialist, a formalist, and several reader/student-response theorists. Because each essayist presents a distinct critical perspective on Gilman’s text, each essay is likewise concerned with “how the narrative teaches and how to teach the narrative” (5). Thus, it seems to me that Weinstock’s The Pedagogical Wallpaper resonates with Pedagogy’s conviction that teaching is central to our work as scholars and educators, no matter what our particular perspective. Indeed, Weinstock’s...
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