Week 4 - Narrative Essay

Introduction

This week, we will continue our work on Narrative Essays. You will be writing and posting a draft of your essay, peer evaluating two of your classmates' drafts, submitting the final draft, and doing a quick lesson and quiz on commas. It's a busy week!

Learning Objectives

After successfully completing the narrative essay lessons, you should be able to:

- describe the purpose, basic components, characteristics, and structure of narrative writing
- demonstrate writing techniques of a narrative essay

Writing Your Narrative Essay First Draft

You already selected your topic for this essay in the previous lesson. Now, it is time to write the draft and get some feedback on it.

When drafting your essay:

- Review the essay writing prompt in the Week 3 module.
- Review the grading rubric.
- Include characters, conflict, sensory details.
- Create a sequence of events in a plot.
- Use the introduction to pull the reader into your experience.
- Avoid addressing the assignment directly. (Don’t write “I am going to write about…” – this takes the fun out of reading the work!)
- Avoid telling just what happens by making sure your essay reflects on why this experience is significant.
- The final essay should be 750-1000 words, so the draft should be close to 750 words.

After completing the draft, please post it for peer evaluation. Details are in the "Activities" section below and in Forums > Narration > Draft.

Peer Evaluations

The time has come for peer evaluations of the drafts. Peer evaluation is your opportunity to get feedback on your essay draft as well as see what other students are writing about. Some benefits of peer evaluations are

- you can recognize the strengths and weaknesses in your own writing after reading and responding to another essay
- you can gain a better understanding of your audience and what they expect from your writing
- you may learn new information from your peers' essays.

After posting your draft, please complete peer evaluations of two peers' narrative essay drafts. Details are in the "Activities" section below and in Forums > Narration > Draft.

Writing Your Narrative Essay Final Draft

Now that you have completed your first draft and have had your essay evaluated, you are ready to rewrite your narrative essay into its final form.

Directions:

- Review the grading rubric for the essay.
- Review your peer evaluations.
- Review instructor feedback.
- Work through the “revising” stage of the writing process.
- Work through the “editing” state of the writing process.
- Make use of resources in the Writing Resources as needed.

After completing the final draft of your essay, please submit it. Details are in the "Activities" section below.

Commas

Before moving on to writing the next essay, we are going to have a grammar lesson on commas.

Commas are needed to avoid confusing readers. Without commas, sentence parts can run into each other and cause misreading.

Confusing sentence that needs a comma: While the family was eating a centipede crawled on the table.

Clarification: To clarify the sentence so that it does not seem like the family is eating a centipede, add a comma after "eating": While the family was eating, a centipede crawled on the table.

The challenge with commas is that people often put a comma in their writing where they would naturally pause when speaking. This causes people to misuse or overuse commas. To remedy that, it is important to learn when and how to use commas.

Please watch this presentation on Five Uses of the Comma:

Comma

"Open Comma" presentation by Susan Wood

After you review the presentation, you can proceed to The Guide to Grammar and Writing for further explanation of these uses of the comma. There you will find 11 uses of the comma. While you will only be quizzed on the five uses that are in the presentation, you should be familiar with the other uses as well, so please review them.

You may want to take the practice quizzes listed at the end of the explanation of commas to make sure you understand the comma.

When you feel confident with your mastery of commas, proceed to Comma Quiz. Details are in the "Activities" section below.

Activities

These are the activities that you need to complete this week. All activities are due by 11:55 p.m. on their due dates.

Draft of Narrative Essay. Write a draft of your narrative essay. Post the completed draft as an attachment to the Forums. Drafts should be about 750-words, double-spaced, and be either .doc, .docx, or .rtf files.
- Due by xx/xx.
- Points: Part of Final Narrative Essay grade. See rubric.
Peer evaluations of Narrative Essay. After you have posted your draft, choose two other students’ essays to evaluate. Please choose essays that have fewer than two peer reviews already completed. Each essay should only be evaluated by two classmates. The peer review form is available in Forums > Narration > Draft
- Two replies due by xx/xx.
- Points: Part of Final Narrative Essay grade. See rubric.
Submit Final Narrative Essay. Submit the final draft of your narrative essay. It should be 750-1000 words and double-spaced, and be either a .doc, .docx, or .rtf file.
- Due by xx/xx.
- Points: 100
Comma quiz. After reviewing the material on the comma, take the comma quiz.
- Due by xx/xx.
- Points: 20

The content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License except for any elements that may be licensed differently. The content of this page includes:

Original content from "ENG COMP I" contributed by Lumen Learning is licensed under CC BY 3.0
Original content from "Writing for Success, v. 1.0" contributed by Saylor Academy is licensed under CC BY NC SA
Original content contributed by Susan Wood
The presentation "Comma" created by Susan Wood

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