Writing Workshop Writing a Personal Narrative Essay

1. Writing WorkshopWriting a Personal Narrative Essay Feature Menu Assignment Prewriting Think About Purpose Choose an Experience Reflect on Your Subject Gather and Record Details Organize Your Reflective Essay Practice and Apply

2. Writing a Reflective Essay Assignment: Write a 1,500-word reflective narrative essay in which you explore the meaning of an important experience. For this assignment, you should reflect on a time you were affected by stereotypes, or felt like an outsider for some reason. When you have a significant experience, you usually know it right away. You might think to yourself, “Wow, I never saw it this way before.” Writing a reflective essay gives you a chance to explore how an important experience has changed you or your ideas about life.

3. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Think About Purpose When you write a reflective essay, your purpose is to • explore the meaning of a personal experience • examine how the experience changed you • tell what the experience says about life in general

4. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Reflect on Your Subject Your reflective essay should • help you examine abstract ideas—love, patience, courage • lead you to a new understanding of your beliefs about life and people

5. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Reflect on Your Subject Consider questions like these as you reflect on your experience. How does (or did) the experience affect me? I experienced a sense of awe at the destructive power of nature. This was a new feeling for me. It is different to see a natural disaster in real life than to watch special effects in a movie.

6. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Reflect on Your Subject How did the experience change my attitudes or behaviors? Being stranded at the community center and not being able to go home or get in touch with my parents gave me a new appreciation for my home and family.

7. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Reflect on Your Subject What universal truth or insight into human existence did the experience teach me? I learned that the most catastrophic events can bring out the best qualities in people—courage, cooperation, kindness, leadership.

8. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Gather and Record Details Recall the events that made up the experience: Visualize each event from beginning to end. Talk to someone else who was there. Look through mementos—photographs, letters, souvenirs. Then, make a list of all the events.

9. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Gather and Record Details Record narrative and descriptive details about each event. These details will help you create concrete images in the minds of your readers. • Narrative details • relate actions, thoughts, and feelings of the people involved in the events I saw a young girl wade through water up to her waist to rescue a cat from her neighbor’s porch.

10. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Gather and Record Details • Narrative details • include dialogue, the actual words spoken by people involved in the experience, and interior monologue, your thoughts during the experience “I just hope my dog is okay,” Diego whispered to me. “I love that dog more than anything else in the world.” “When will we be able to call our families?” I wondered silently.

11. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Gather and Record Details • Descriptive details • describe the way people look Some of the last people to arrive at the center had been rescued from cars or homes. Most had been provided with dry, but ill-fitting, clothes. They carried their own clothes in plastic sacks. Many of them still seemed to be in shock.

12. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Gather and Record Details • Descriptive details • describe settings of events By this time the community center was crowded with evacuees. There were no cots and very few chairs. We tried to sleep on blankets on the hardwood floor of the gymnasium, but very few people actually slept that night. We could hear news pouring out of radios all night long.

13. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Gather and Record Details Throughout your essay . . . • maintain a balance in the events. (Don’t spend all your time narrating just one event.) As you narrate each event . . . • describe your thoughts and feelings to hint at the meaning of the experience In your conclusion . . . • state the significance of the experience • connect the experience to abstract ideas

14. WhatHappenedFirst WhatHappenedSecond WhatHappenedThird . . . and so on Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Organize Your Reflective Essay Arrange the events in chronological order—the order in which they occurred. You might want to vary the chronological order by using flashbacksand flash-forwards.

15. Details arranged by location in space—top to bottom, near to far, and so on • Points arranged from most important to least important, or vice versa • Good for describing places, people, or objects • Good for discussing effects and ideas Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Organize Your Reflective Essay Within chronological order, you can use other organizational patterns for certain purposes. Order of Importance Spatial Order [End of Section]

16. Writing a Reflective EssayPrewriting: Practice and Apply First, choose a subject for your reflective essay. Then • reflect upon your subject • gather narrative and descriptive details • organize your essay [End of Section]