...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. 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 ...
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...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 toward me out of the woods” provides...
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...Camille Hoffman 5/10/11 8C My Narrative My English teacher, Ms. Peterson, told us that our next assignment was to write a narrative speech on an influential event in our life. She told us that we might want to write about a near-death experience or a life-changing event, as long as it had a moral and it had to be autobiographical. It couldn’t be made up or about someone else. I thought about this for a long time, trying to come up with a topic. It was difficult because I have a pretty stable life. I thought that maybe I could talk about the time I got separated from my class on the ski trip. I wandered around, lost, while the rest of the class was on the bus waiting for me, until the ski patrol finally found me, but that didn’t happen to me; that happened to one of my friends. Then I considered the time I was on vacation in Nicaragua. It was raining heavily, and I went to cross what looked like a creek. As I stepped into the water, I lost my footing and got sucked into a drainpipe and almost died, but that didn’t happen to me either. That happened to my dad. I could always give a speech on the time I went to the Museum of Tolerance, and learned about the tragedies of the Holocaust, but I’m pretty sure that happened to Sam. Or maybe I could tell that story about the time I had an asthma attack when I was trying to save someone during junior lifeguards, but that wasn’t me, that was Anna. What if I told the class about the time I snuck out of the house to go to a party...
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...problems in 6th grade, but by that summer it became very easy to notice a problem. My mom told me not to worry about it, and I could tell my doctor about it at my next appointment. That August I went to the doctor for a regular check-up and told her about it. “I don’t think it’s supposed to do that,” said my doctor. She gave me an appointment card for later that day to go get x-rays. I went to get the x-rays and was told to come back in a few days. When I came back, I was nervous. My back had been feeling worse everyday. The doctor entered the room and pulled up my x-rays. He zoomed in to a strange looking part of my spine....
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...The Narrative Essay The narrative essay is simply a complete account of an incident or incidents contained in one cohesive essay. The narrative essay is useful when writing an incident report, such as an automobile accident or a criminal action. By far, one of the best uses of the narrative is when introducing the thesis for a longer work, i.e. a research paper. Your audience for this essay is your fellow classmates and the teacher. Assignment Write a narrative essay, the purpose of which is the serve as evidence for the position you have taken on an issue. The issue in the sample essay is how the writer lost his teeth. The essay must be a minimum of 380 words and no more than 400 words. You will superscript the number of the comma rule that justifies it over each comma. When you turn in your final draft, you must turn in a minimum 100-word, process paragraph expressing what you learned as a result of this assignment. Learning Objectives • To format documents correctly in accordance with MLA; • To understand the structure of a narrative paragraph; • To understand your own unique voice (syntax and tone); • To eliminate sentence fragments, run-ons, and comma splices; • To eliminate point of view errors; • To eliminate verb tense errors; • To eliminate punctuation errors – commas; • To have fun. The Narrative Structure A narrative is a story, and like a story has a definite underlying structure. The parts of a narrative are the situation, conflict...
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...Narrative Writing Prompt “Round’em Up and Move ‘em Out!” and “A Life on the Trail” give information about how life was on a cattle drive. Think about what might have happened if you were actually participating on a drive. Write a narrative for your teacher about being on a cattle drive. Be sure to include narrative elements such as sensory details, dialogue, figurative language, and description as they are appropriate in your writing. Use details and information from the passage in your narrative. Writer’s Checklist My narrative has an effective beginning, middle, and end. My narrative flows smoothly from one idea to another. My narrative develops plot, character(s), and setting. My narrative includes specific and relevant details,...
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...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 day with...
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...Literature is an effective way to evoke emotions in a reader because it presents universal situations in which all people can relate to. While reading Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative I learned more about the hardships that slaves were forced to endure. As I read the selection, I felt sadness, astonishment, and anger. From the beginning to the end, this selection made me feel sad as I read it. In the beginning of the narrative, Equiano states “an end was put to my happiness” when referring to his kidnapping at age 11. After that, he only saw his sister once ever again and tells us they “were soon deprived of the small comfort of weeping together.” When Equiano is on the slave ship and talking about the conditions and how some people...
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...To begin with this article is concerned with Nasca iconography on ceramics and art. The main argument is that the Nasca artists based their imagery on things they may have seen and experienced in the world around them. It argues that the ceramics are responsible to represent selected features of their environment. The article mentions that the Nasca art describes a time, place and culture. Furthermore, the article indicates that Nasca art is strongly concerned with the imagery of war, thus, indicating that there might have been a lot of violent conflict in this culture. It also mentions that the war for the Nasca people was internal as in the art there was no foreign prisoners, nor scenes of homage or tribute-paying rites. In addition, the...
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...about the city. Yet, in actuality, I know none of the history surrounding this city, or the communities that make it up. During orientation, Jennifer Arnolds took a group of students and me on a bus tour of the Rondo community. While on the bus I remember thinking about how I knew these buildings and physical spaces that we were occupying, but the stories that Jennifer was telling were unfamiliar to me. I-94 has been a staple in my life as long as I can remember, it’s the freeway to get to our Santa pictures in the winter, and the road that brings me home after spending the day at...
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...The primary purpose of historical narratives is to report as accurately as possible what happened at each particular place and time in history. But each of the writers in this unit (De Vaca, Bradford, and Equiano) went beyond merely reporting the facts; they had other, more personal reasons for writing what they did. Each of them had a personal agenda. Equiano’s personal agenda in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was to shame his white audience into abolishing the slave trade by describing the horrible events that took place on the ship. While he did state facts about the ship, Equiano described personal experiences to persuade the audience more. For example, Equiano describes the smell of the hold as being “…so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to...
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...These former slaves, were born in the last years of slavery or during the Civil War provides us with a look in their lives in their lives The narratives are a very positive travel in time. It gives us a glimpse of slaverys and makes us understand what slaves had to endure. The slave narratives use the actual voice of the slave and their believe in GOD. The first slave narrative that I will dissuss is Fountain Hughes from, Baltimore, Maryland. Hughes was 101 during this interview and was born a slave in 1848 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fountain Hughes was grandfather was owned by Thomas Jefferson. Fountain Hughes were left poor and homeless after slavery and speaks about having to carry a pass to get from one place to another, his thoughts on soldiers and slave auctions. Hughes starts off his interview explaining why he believes people should never buy with credit. Hughes didn’t believe in owing money to creditors. Hughes’s states in his interview “I, nothing in the world worries me. I can sit here in this house at night, nobody can come and say, "Mr. Hughes, you owe me a quarter, you owe me a dollar, you owe me five cents." No you can't. I don't owe you nothing (Hughes, Library of Congress). Growing up as a slave restricted Hughes from a lot of the things that human beings take for granted. Hughes when on to explain what happened after he was free. Slaves were homeless, without food, jobs, and money. Hughes compares him and other slaves to cattle. He felt this way because...
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...One day I was driving with my eight-year-old brother to the store and he began to talk to me about Christopher Columbus and how they are learning that he discovered America in school. He looked at me straight in the eye with a confused face and said “that's not what he did Esme he was a murderer,” he knew this because when my sisters and I would talk about certain aspects of history he was there listening to everything. This was around the same time that we were discussing censorship through school curriculum so I felt that if my little brother understood it then other children could too. When he was talking about this it sounded a lot like the class was learning from a hegemonic device. School is where kids are being taught the “history” of how America came to be a diverse country. Through the course Culture Power and School Knowledge, one can see that the “history” being taught through the Master Narrative is one-sided. The Master Narrative focuses on “history” that comes from the people who hold power therefore excluding the actual experiences of the people of color meaning that it is a hegemonic device. Being a...
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...It is clear that throughout this trip, that lasted a mere three and a half months, we have experienced a great deal of narratives. These have ranged from incredibly uplifting to deeply solemn. These stories have shaped the people, places, and history that we have learned about, and continue to shape the people who encounter them today. Some of these narratives are extremely hard to express, verging on the border of the inexpressible. However, there lies an importance in being bale to articulate certain memories and experiences to pass them on to the ones who did not have the privilege of experiencing them. These experiences have shaped me beyond belief, and I hope to express how these varied experiences have changed me for the better. One...
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...Second Semester Final Exam: Portfolio A: Narrative/Descriptive Writing Parasailing (Vignette) Narrative and descriptive writing is the writing style I enjoy the most. The vignette I wrote about is a story that happened to me when I was younger and this kind of writing allows me to relive this memory on paper. I find this kind of writing easier to write and easy to relate to because it’s all about me. It is harder for me to write and relate to a book that we read in class since it isn’t about my personal life. This kind of writing style helps me reflect on the something I learned because I have seen how much I have grown this school year based off of what I wrote about and my writing style. This kind of writing style allows me to describe...
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