Narrative Essay
For this paper, you will write a narrative essay that tells the reader something about yourself. You have a few options as to how to approach this assignment.
Option One: You could consider what people or what experiences in your life have impacted you profoundly, helping you to learn something about yourself and/or causing you to open yourself up and reexamine yourself or what you thought you knew. For your first paper assignment, write a narrative-descriptive essay about one such experience or person. To choose a subject, reflect on your memories of people, places, and events, picking a significant incident or person. If you have trouble thinking of or deciding upon a topic, try listing a number of memorable incidents and then freewrite on the one that seems most significant.
Option Two: You could write a “Literacy Narrative” about the influence that a particular social and/or cultural environment had on your literate practices and how those practices may or may not have fit in with the environment. In other words, you will examine the way you had to change your communication practices to fit into a new environment (whether it was a different school; a new neighborhood, state, or country; or a new workplace, for instance) and how successful you were in fitting in to that new environment. Literate practices may include speaking, writing, reading, and interpretation, and you may write about these practices in terms of communication conventions, the expectations for behavior or performance, an understanding and acceptance of roles and responsibilities, etc., in a particular setting.
Option Three: You could write an essay in which you reflect upon yourself as a writer. When planning and writing your paper, consider how you feel about writing (and about writing classes for that matter). Do you like writing? Do you dread it? Are you pretty comfortable writing papers, or is it something that sends you into full-blown panic and hyperventilation? What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer? When answering this last question, you should consider what you personally feel are your strengths and weaknesses, but you should also talk about what you have been told about your writing. In addressing your feelings and thoughts about writing and about yourself as a writer, consider both your own feelings and what you have been told about your writing. Be sure to make your reflections more concrete, show me! Give examples. Tell a story about an experience (or experiences).
Remember that this essay is in the genre of personal narrative, a form of creative non-fiction. It should have a subtle thesis that establishes the significance of the focal event(s) to your experiences and/or society at large as opposed to stating the thesis at the end of the first paragraph or announcing it as a “moral of the story” in the essay’s final paragraph. You’ll have more of an unstated theme guiding your paper. Your audience for this essay will be your peers.
The first major part, the introduction, should include your subtle thesis, presenting your subject (for example, the experience about which you are writing) and its significance (what you learned from the experience). The introduction should also seize your reader’s attention and set the tone. Make me want to read your paper!
The second major section, the body of the essay, should narrate, or tell the story of, the incident you’ve chosen. In the body, include enough specific details to answer the questions, who? what? when? where? why? and how? You will probably want to organize these details with a chronological structure, using transitional words such as “next,” “then,” “after,” “before,” “in the meantime,” “finally,” and “at the same time”. Keep in mind that you will also want to describe the most important scenes more vividly than others, including specific details that appeal to the senses of sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch. You might organize these scenes spatially with transitions such as “to the right,” “behind,” and “to my left.”
The last major part, the conclusion, should reiterate your thesis statement and answer the “so what?” question but also end the essay with a bang, perhaps by using a quotation or a provocative question.
I look forward to getting to know each of you a little bit better. The paper will be roughly 3 pages or so to allow for adequate introspection, careful thought, and, of course, specific examples.
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In my life there are two things that are as slightly fulfilling as writing. One of them is reading books and the other is capturing moments through photographs. I love writing to the point I could write short memos in my phone…
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