Hello, Students:
Here are
some additional instructions for your narrative essay. You will be telling a story--but
your purpose is not just to entertain. You will also be trying to make a point.
You will be writing about an event in your life in order to make a point: (1)
we must learn to overcome our fears; (2) lying only leads to more lies; (3) a
mother will do anything for her child; (4) being mature means thinking about
others before yourself—etc.
As a mode of expository writing, the narrative approach, more than any other,
offers you a chance to think and write about yourself. We all have experiences
lodged in our memories which are worthy of sharing with readers. Yet sometimes
they are so fused with other memories that a lot of the time spent in writing
narrative is in the prewriting stage.
Do
This First
In this stage, you first
need to select an incident worthy of writing about and, second, to find
relevance in that incident. To do this, ask yourself what about the incident
provided new insights or awareness. Then plan an outline of action (plot) with details
which will make the incident real for readers.
For your follow-up post in
this discussion board, please state your thesis and outline for the narrative
essay that you are planning. Before doing so, please continue reading the
instructions below and the models provided.
Your assignment
for this week is to state a thesis (the general point you will be making in the
essay) and then to outline a sequence of events and details in chronological
sequence that you will use to tell the story. Before you prepare your thesis
and outline, let's review some important principles and techniques of this type
of writing.
Once an
incident is chosen, keep three principles in mind.
In writing
your narrative essay, keep the following conventions in mind.
Descriptive Elements
After selecting an incident
worthy of writing about and finding the central, relevant, salient point in
that incident, your next task is to incorporate details which will make the
incident real for readers.
The ability to describe something
convincingly will serve you well in any kind of essay situation. The most
important thing to remember is that your job as writer is to show, not tell.
If you say that the tree is beautiful, your readers are put on the defensive:
"Wait a minute," they think. "We'll be the judge of that! Show
us a beautiful tree and we'll believe." Do not rely, then, on adjectives
that attempt to characterize a thing's attributes. Lovely, exciting,
interesting – these are all useful adjectives in casual speech or when
we're pointing to something that is lovely, etc., but in careful writing they
don't do much for us; in fact, they sound hollow.
Let nouns and verbs do the
work of description for you. With nouns, your readers will see; with verbs,
they will feel. In the following paragraph, taken from George Orwell's famous
essay, "Shooting an Elephant," see how the act of shooting the
elephant delivers immense emotional impact. What adjectives would you expect to
find in a paragraph about an elephant? big? grey? loud? enormous? Do you find
them here? Watch the verbs, instead. Notice, too, another truth about
description: when time is fleeting, slow down the prose. See how long the few
seconds of the shooting can take in this paragraph.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or
feel the kick–one never does when a shot goes home–but I heard the devilish
roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time,
one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious,
terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but
every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken,
immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed him
without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time–it might have
been five seconds, I dare say–he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth
slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have
imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the
second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet
and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third
time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his
whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling
he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he
seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward
like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came,
his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I
lay.
Sample
Student Essay
Below is a student's essay,
"An Encounter with Fate." Notice how the thesis is hinted at in the
beginning and then cemented at the end. Also take note how Al concentrates on
telling the story with character dialogue, concrete details and action verbs.
An
Encounter with Fate
By Al Gregor
The day started like every one before it that week—I was a little nervous about my new position. My boss told me I would be driving all town over delivering goods to hundreds of customers. This was a little daunting as I had little driving experience and I was wary of the large truck I’d been given the keys to. I left the warehouse and started out on my long journey with a full load of pharmaceuticals. It never crossed my mind that my life could change forever in a matter of seconds. Although I started the day as a nervous truck driver, I ended it as a would-be killer.
The weather was good and my biggest challenge was finding the thirty plus stores I had to call on. I visited store after store and kept close watch on the time. With eighteen stores behind me and almost as many to go, I felt at ease as time was on my side. I was starting to get the hang of driving my largest vehicle to date and felt good about my new job.
Driving through a residential area, I slowed down to pass two young boys riding side-by-side near the curb on bicycles. I felt that I had adequate spacing and continued to pass the boys to their left. I was almost past them when my heart sank. The boy closest to me swerved in front of the truck. I saw him disappear under the front bumper and heard a loud thump. The whole event seemed to occur in slow motion. I slammed the brakes, the rear tires screeched and the smell of burning rubber filled the air. Then there was only dead stillness and the rumbling of the truck’s diesel engine. I could only see one very scared boy and had no idea how his friend was under the truck.
People ran from their yards toward the scene. I leapt out of and, to my surprise, the boy stood up and dusted himself off. Of course, he was crying and visibly shaken but he hadn’t gone under the wheels of the truck as I had feared. The bump I felt and heard had been his bike and nothing else. I nervously asked if he was alright.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” I replied. “I didn’t think you were going to swerve in front of me.”
His friend told me the boy lived just across the street and that he would take him home. Just then, a man approached me. “I saw the whole thing,” he exclaimed. I was still trying to catch my breath at this point and could hardly speak. He told me he was a driving instructor and that I must call the police and fill out a report. Just as I was starting to feel relief, he told me that the police should be informed in case the boy suffered injuries later.
The police arrived and gave me a breathalyzer and took all my details and account of the incident. The police officer had been informed by the boy’s parents that the boy was well and I was told that I was free to go. But I would never be free from the thought of how, in a split second, life can be taken away from a child--and become a nightmare for a driver