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Tell a short, powerful, true story.
What's a Narrative Essay?
What's a Narrative Essay?
Narration answers the question "What happened?" It can be used to tell real or fictional stories, to relate historical events, to present personal experience, or to support an analysis of events. Telling stories -- or narration -- is a basic pattern of organizing your thoughts. You employ narration on a daily basis--to tell what happened at work, at school, in the cafeteria, or on a Saturday night. Narration is also essential to many forms of academic writing, ranging from history, to sociology, to science. When planning and writing narration, keep in mind the following guidelines:
Present the events of your narration in a logical and coherent order. Make certain you link events through the use of appropriate transitional words.
Select the narrative details carefully to suit the purpose of the essay. Narrate only those aspects of the event that serve to illustrate and support your thesis.
Choose a point of view and perspective suitable for your optic an audience. Narrative point of view may be either first or third person. A first-person narrative (I, we) is suitable for stories about yourself.
Use dialogue. It adds a realism and interest to your narrative.
Limit the scope of the event you are narrating, and bring it to a suitable conclusion or climax.
When narration is used for informational or expository purposes, the story makes a point, illustrates a principle, or explains something. In other words, the event tends to serve as evidence in support of your thesis.
Step-by-Step Narrative Writing
Step-by-Step Narrative Writing
STEP 1: FREE-WRITE!!!
STEP 1: FREE-WRITE!!!
Telling stories should be easy. We hear and tell stories all the time. But when we actually have to put words on paper, we forget our storytelling abilities: We can’t think of a topic. We omit relevant details, but go on and on about irrelevant ones. Our dialogue is bland. We can’t figure out how to start. We can’t figure out how to end. So the first step in getting good narrative writing is to see that you are already telling stories every day. You gather at lockers to talk about that thing that happened over the weekend. You sit at lunch and describe an argument you had with a sibling. Without even thinking about it, you begin sentences with “This one time…” and launch into stories about your earlier childhood experiences. You are natural storytellers; learning how to do it well on paper is simply a matter of studying good models, then imitating what those writers do. “Those who tell the stories rule the world.” We can forge new relationships and strengthen the ones we already have. We can change a law, inspire a movement, make people care fiercely about things they’d never given a passing thought.It is one of the things that makes human beings extraordinary. It’s how we connect to each other. It’s something to celebrate, to study, to perfect.
The most helpful parts for a really good narrative it to embrace the early drafting stages. Scratch out whatever comes to your mind, run-on sentences and all. Then, in the revision stage, you can cross out what you don't like, rearrange, and make tons of notes on your writing. Forcing yourself through this process allows us to see how writing is truly made.
STEP 2: REMEMBER THE STRUCTURE OF A STORY
STEP 2: REMEMBER THE STRUCTURE OF A STORY
Now that you have a good library of your own personal stories pulled into short-term memory, shift your focus to a more formal study of what a story looks like.Let's revisit Freytag's plotline for a simple story—like this Coca Cola commercial—fill out the story arc with the components from that story. Once you have seen this mapped out, try it with another one, like a story you’ve read in class, a whole novel, or another short video.
STEP 3: READ MODELS
STEP 3: READ MODELS
Look at sample essays (mentor texts) ... immerse yourself in stories!
STEP 4: STORY MAPPING
STEP 4: STORY MAPPING
At this point, decide what you are going to write about. If you are still stuck for a topic, just pick something you can write about, even if it’s not the most captivating story in the world. A skilled writer could tell a great story about deciding what to have for lunch. If you are using the skills of narrative writing, the topic isn’t as important as the execution.
Complete a basic story arc for your chosen topic using a basic plotline. This will help make sure that you actually have a story to tell, with an identifiable problem, a sequence of events that build to a climax, and some kind of resolution, where something is different by the end.STEP 5: QUICK DRAFTS
STEP 5: QUICK DRAFTS
Now, get your chosen story down on paper as quickly as possible: This could be basically a long paragraph that would read almost like a summary, but it would contain all the major parts of the story. What you want is a working draft, a starting point, something to build on for later, rather than a blank page (or screen) to stare at.
STEP 6: PLAN THE PACING
STEP 6: PLAN THE PACING
Now that the story has been born in raw form, begin to shape it. Consider pacing -- look at how writers expand some moments to create drama and shrink other moments so that the story doesn’t drag. Creating a diagram forces a writer to decide how much space to devote to all of the events in the story. *Here's where the background on syntax and diction is helpful! Manipulate your words and sentences and thoughts and inspirations. [<-- polysyndeton]
STEP 7: LONG DRAFTS
STEP 7: LONG DRAFTS
With a good plan in hand, slow down and write a proper draft, expanding the sections of the story that you plan to really draw out and adding in more of the details that were left out in the quick draft.
STEP 8: WORKSHOP
STEP 8: WORKSHOP
Once there is a decent rough draft—something that has a basic beginning, middle, and end, with some discernible rising action, a climax of some kind, and a resolution, shift into full-on workshop mode.
Topics for consideration:
Weave exposition into your story so you don’t give readers an “information dump”
Carefully select dialogue to create good scenes, rather than quoting everything in a conversation
Punctuate and format dialogue so that it imitates the natural flow of a conversation
Describe things using sensory details and figurative language; also, what to describe…students too often give lots of irrelevant detail
Choose precise nouns and vivid verbs, use a variety of sentence lengths and structures, and add transitional words, phrases, and features to help the reader follow along
Consider how you start, end, and title a story
STEP 9: REVISIONS AND EDITS
STEP 9: REVISIONS AND EDITS
As the unit nears its end, move from revision, altering the content of a piece, toward editing, making smaller changes to the mechanics of the writing. Understand the difference between the two: You should not be correcting each other’s spelling and punctuation in the early stages of this process, when the focus should be on shaping a better story.
One of the most effective strategies for revision and editing is to read the stories out loud. In the early stages, this will reveal places where information is missing or things get confusing. Later, more read-alouds will help immediately find missing words, unintentional repetitions, and sentences that just “sound weird.” So read the work out loud frequently. It also helps to print stories on paper: For some reason, seeing the words in print helps us notice things we didn’t see on the screen.To get the most from peer review -- reading and commenting on each other's work -- we will look at a sample piece of writing and how to give specific feedback that helps, rather than simply writing "good detail" or "needs more detail."STEP 10: PUBLICATION
STEP 10: PUBLICATION
Once revision and peer review are done, you will hand in your final copy.
MORE EXAMPLES
MORE EXAMPLES
GA (danell.simons v1).docxStill stuck?
Still stuck?
Tell Mrs. Simons to write it for you!
JUST KIDDING. Actually, this is illegal. You've got this. Think of a story that has impacted who you are today, and get writing. Stop talking. Just write.It also helps to read samples (see below). Tell Mrs. Simons to write it for you!
Remember, the scholarship essay is a piece of persuasion. You need to distinguish yourself. You need to make the reader care. How to be persuasive? Be real. Adopt a voice which is true to who you are. Does this mean that you should lapse into swear words and misspellings? No, of course not, but be truthful and real in your essay.
Freewriting
writing privately and writing without stopping. Just write whatever words come to your mind or whatever you want to explore at this moment. Don’t worry about whether your writing is any good or even whether it makes sense. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. If you can’t think of the word you want, just put in a squiggle. Keep on writing and see what comes. Changing topics is fine. Follow your mind or the words wherever they want to go. If you run out of something to say, just write "I have nothing to say," or write about how you feel at the moment, or keep repeating the last word or the last sentence. Or write swear words. More will come. Don’t worry about trying to write fast and capture everything that comes to mind. I like cats.The main thing in freewriting is trusting yourself and your words: taking a spirit of adventure. The no stopping doesn’t mean you have to hurry or be tense. You can write slowly and take your time to breathe and keep your hand or arm from tensing up. Since you don’t have to worry about whether there are any mistakes or whether someone else would like or dislike what you write, try to pour your full attention on the feelings and thoughts in your mind. Invite risks. Remember you don’t have to show freewriting to anyone except to me, and you may edit out anything with which you're uncomfortable. And you probably should delete the swear words.Focused Freewriting
is writing where you stay on one topic, but you harness your "freewriting muscle"– the muscle that enables you to pour words down on paper without planning or worrying about quality. You are harnessing that muscle for the sake of exploring one subject. Focused freewriting is especially useful for the hardest thing about writing: getting started. Focused freewriting is a tremendously powerful technique to help you in writing your essay, but you need to have topics or, better yet, questions which stimulate effective writing. We’re all smart as whips if we’re asked interesting questions. Ask a boring question and we’re dumb as posts. So, you’re welcome to make up your own questions, but here are a few which might help. Now, your scholarship may have a particular topic and you’ll have to gear your responses appropriately, but here are some which I found useful for all scholarship essays: What would make the reader care enough about you to pay attention and keep reading. Relate a brief event in descriptive terms: Do you have an experience which symbolizes, in a fashion, who you are?What other reasons can you think of why you deserve this scholarship? What do you want the reader to know? What are you proud of in your life, school, work, family? (Show don’t tell. Immerse the reader in the experience) Why are you more deserving than someone else? What makes you special? Generate 5 more writing topics which you think would be helpful. The crazier the better!Easy Organization
Okay, so now that you’ve cut out unnecessary phrases in your generative writing, you’ve got most of the material you will need to complete this assignment. Congratulations. Now, before we proceed, take a few deep breaths and don’t stress about what this end product is going to look like. Basically, you’re going to take those phrases and passages that remain– the good ones– and arrange them intuitively. Classical essay structure dictates that the introduction introduces the ideas to be covered in the essay, and each body paragraph then supports and advances the ideas put forth in the introduction, but we’re going to be a more free in this assignment. We’re not trying to escape from understanding or implementing formal essay organization, but I’m trying to rattle you out of the notion that you already don’t know how to organize your thoughts. Basically, I’m leaving it up to you what passages you want to put first, which ones second, third, and so on. But what about paragraph breaks, introductions, transitions, and conclusions? Those are great and your essay could end up resembling a formal type of essay. I think that paragraphs should be at least 5 sentences long and no more than Each should develop a single idea. I’m asking you to arrange things intuitively. Drag things, cut and paste, move lines here or there in your essay. Put those bits of writing that you think would grab the reader first. You decide what you want second, third, and so on.Fine Polishing
What other considerations are there? There are a couple of others. After you’ve done a bit of organizing, you should start working on making each sentence as complete and grammatically correct as possible. You can also add in a few sentences here or there or make your language more vivid, but do not go overboard in revising. Instead, I want this to be a purely "negative" assignment. Like Michaelangelo chipping away at a giant slab of limestone, you are removing the excess of your writing to reveal the quality within. If you feel the need to do a bit more writing, fine, but I want you to experience how quality writing and organization can be accomplished very easily.
additional resources
additional resources
ds.College Essay Talk TPT 2.pptx<-- UNL
MORE SCHOLARSHIP ESSAY INFO AND PROMPTS
MORE SCHOLARSHIP ESSAY INFO AND PROMPTS
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