Narration, Description, and Reflection

1. Narration, Description, and Reflection • Mr. Varvel Reading Personal Essays Brief Narratives: Anecdotes

2. Narration, Description, and Reflection • Objectives: • Understand elements of narrative writing: setting, character, plot, dialogue, and theme • Understand nature and use of anecdotes • Know traits and functions of reflective writing • Know traits and functions of descriptive writing • Use strategies like these to write a personal narrative essay

3. Narration, Description, and Reflection Personal Narratives • Tell stories writers actually lived (non-fiction) • Should help readers see, hear, touch, taste, and/or smell details that make the story come to life • Contain careful description of key elements of the experience • Can also reflect on experience's importance

4. Reading Personal Essays • Consider rhetorical situation • Think about writer's purpose, audience, and topic, and how they might be linked • Purpose: Personal essays explore meaningful aspects of life • Audience: Most personal essays written for general audience; want readers to empathize and connect with writer's experience • Topic: Writers examine what they find meaningful and worth exploring

5. Reading Personal Essays • Consider writer's strategies • Personal essays usually use narration, description, and reflection (can combine these with other strategies like compare/contrast) • Narration: tells a story using tools like well-developed characters, dialogue that develops characters, action that includes conflicts and shows what characters do (usually chronological), and setting • Description: precise details that help readers sensually and thoughtfully experience topic (can include figurative language – simile, metaphor, symbol, etc.) • Reflection: relays writer's observations and insights regarding the nature, impact, and value of experience

6. Brief Narratives: Anecdotes • Anecdote: brief story that enlivens writing while introducing a topic or illustrating an idea • Introducing a topic: “The other day, my wife, watching our son-in-law with his large hands gracefully tie shoelaces of his little daughter, remarked, “You are really deft.” Ever the cynic, I remarked, “He's not only deft, he's daft.” I talk that sort of nonsense frequently, but as I said this, I began to wonder. What if deft and daft come from the same root and once meant the same thing? A quick trip to the dictionary showed that, indeed, they did once mean the same thing (though my wife thought me daft when I first suggested it).”

7. Brief Narratives: Anecdotes • Anecdote Illustrating a Point • “Last week, the senate majority leader, Harry Reid, found himself in trouble for once suggesting that Barack Obama had a political edge over other African-American candidates because he was 'light-skinned' and had 'no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.' Mr. Reid was not expressing sadness but a gleeful opportunism that Americans were still judging another by the color of their skin, rather than – as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose legacy we commemorated on Monday, dreamed – by the content of their character.”

8. Final Thoughts on Personal Narrative • Use Prewriting techniques (i.e. Freewriting) to recall details • Tell a story that actually happened and that has meaning for you • Use Description and Narrative tools like characters, dialogue, setting to make your story “come to life” for the reader • Narrative thesis is often implied – don't ruin your story by stating the point at the beginning • Find the most important part of your story and use pacing to emphasize it – Move more quickly through the less important parts; slow time during the important parts by using more description and dialogue. • Showing vs. Telling

9. References • VanderMey, Randall, et al. The College Writer: A Guide to Reading, Writing, and Researching. 4th ed. Boston: Cengage, 2012.