Our Writing Process

Welcome to our VIRTUAL Personal Narrative Writing Celebration! We spent the first few months of school working through the narrative writing process and we are excited to finally virtually share our personal narratives with our families and friends.

First, we discussed the elements of a Personal Narrative. We learned that it is a story written in the first person about something that has happened to us in the past. We also reviewed the literary elements found in Narrative Writing.

Once we knew more about the elements of Personal Narratives, we began the first part of the writing process: Prewriting and Brainstorming. We studied different emotions to generate memories from our past, we thought about people, places and things close to our hearts, and we reminisced about first and final moments. We then selected one small moment that we felt we remembered the best and would be the most exciting to share.

After watching our teachers complete a model story mountain map, we each completed our own. We focused on setting the scene, the rising action, the turning point, the falling action and the conclusion. It was then time to turn our notes into our first drafts. We made sure to type all of our thoughts and ideas out in chronological order so the story made sense.

Building our Narrative Writer’s Toolbox came next. First, we studied strong and effective leads. We learned that Personal Narratives can start in many different ways. Some examples are beginning with the end, a deep thought, an action, a checklist, “show not tell” or dialogue. We wrote 3 different leads because we know good authors always write several beginnings so that they have options from which to choose.

We then learned all about dialogue, dialogue tags and adverbs. We studied a variety of dialogue tags to use instead of said so that we could really explain the character’s emotions in our narratives. We also learned how to punctuate dialogue correctly when speaking internally or in a conversation. We read through our narratives and found places where we could add internal dialogue and add or change dialogue, dialogue tags and adverbs.

After that, we studied a variety of Figurative Language. We learned how to use similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, adages, proverbs, and idioms to creatively express ourselves in our writing.

Then, we learned how to incorporate Show Not Tell for emotions, weather, and seasons. Show Not Tell is when you use descriptive language to help paint the picture in the reader’s mind. Along with Show Not Tell, we focused on Exploding The Moment. We honed in on our turning point of our narratives and imagined playing it back in slow motion. We stretched out this moment to include every detail to allow our reader to feel like he/she was really there.

As we approached the end of our writing, we reviewed Clever Closings. These closings can include a hope, a wish, a lesson learned, or a moral. We like to use our quotes that we learn each day to end our stories and really leave our reader’s satisfied.

After all parts of our Writer’s Toolbox were added to our Personal Narratives, it was time to Revise. We learned that revising means adding, removing, rearranging, and replacing content of our stories. We conferenced with our peers to help us with our writing as well. After reading our friend’s comments, we made any final revisions.

Finally, we were ready to Edit. We printed our narratives and we used our colored pens to edit our work. We checked our writing for punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. Then we had our writing partner help edit our stories, in case we missed any mistakes.

Throughout the entire writing process, we also conferenced with our teachers. They read through our pieces with us and helped us find places in our writing where we could revise even more! In case you were wondering, our teachers DID NOT edit our Narratives for or with us, as they wanted our writing to be authentic!

As we wrapped up our writing, we wrote an about the author page, created a title with alliteration, and copied our final draft into our published slides.

On the last slides of our published piece, you will see links to all of our drafts described above. Please make sure to look at all of the different drafts we’ve written so you can see how much work went into this final piece! You will also see a link to our interactive writer’s notebooks where you can see all of the writing and work we have done in this unit. Finally, you will see a link that says “Click Here to Comment on My Writing!”. If you could take a few minutes to leave the author a comment, some feedback, or perhaps a favorite line, it would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you all for coming to our virtual Personal Narrative Celebration! Happy Reading!