Personal Narrative

Ms. Hollins

AP Language and Composition

Form

The format is a personal essay guided by a dominant impression rather than a thesis statement. Length: 2-3 pages, approximately. Typed, double-spaced, 1” margins, 12 pt. Times-New Roman font.

Purpose

Your purpose is to bring your event to life using language that helps the reader understand the significance of the event. You want the reader to feel like a direct observer or even a participant in scenes you are creating. Your goal is to invite the reader to relive the experience with you as you reflect on the event’s meaning. Your overall purpose is to learn how writing is developed through invention activities, rough drafts, revision, and editing. For models, consider the essays discussed in class (Thoreau, Hughes, Douglass) and others in the Longman anthology such as Mayblum.

Writer’s Role

You are someone who shares a significant experience through the shaping strategies of personal narrative.

Audience

You are writing for people high school age and beyond who want to learn about people and the world byreading the words of those who directly experienced a significant event.

Procedure

October 11-October 17: Prioritize a list of potential topics and begin to draft the narrative.

October 18 and October 19: Discussion and partner work.

October 23: Personal Narrative Essay DUE in class with Turnitin receipt.

The purpose of an autobiographical narrative is to express or share something significant in your own life. In this type of essay, the writer does not state the significance up front in a thesis although the mood, the dominant impression, the main ideas must begin from the very start. The writer lets the essay unfold in story- like fashion with reflection . Autobiographical writing explores, deepens, and complicates our perception of the world. Most importantly, autobiographical writing is used to reveal parts of our identity.

Your life does not have to have high drama in order to provide the foundation for a nontrivial essay. You do not have to have won the Nobel Prize, or dated a famous movie star, or won a national competition to write an effective essay. Significance—the most important quality in this type of essay—is not a quality out there in the events of your life: it's in the sensibility that you bring to those events and the way you write about them.

Good writing is rooted in the writer's perception of a problem. Problems are at the center not only of thesis-based writing but also of narrative writing. In effective narration, the problem usually takes the form of a contrary, two or more things in opposition—ideas, characters, expectations, forces, worldviews, or whatever. Some examples include: your old self versus your new self; your old view of person X versus your new view of person X; your old values versus new values that threaten, challenge, or otherwise disrupt the old values.

Characteristics of autobiographical narrative include:

  • Dialogue
  • Attention to sensory detail
  • Some Scene-by-scene construction
  • Conflict

Consider the following list of significant moments that have figured in numerous autobiographical narratives. Remember, however, that the narrative should not be a string of clichés or generalizations about big ideas. If you present the idea vividly through scenes, or through concrete details, your reader will understand the larger point you are making. You should have a passionate point of view, but do not hit your reader over the head with it through general statements. Instead, bring it to life with great writing.

  • Moments of enlightenment or coming to knowledge: understanding a complex idea for the first time, recognizing what is meant by love or jealousy or justice, mastering a complex skill, seeing some truth about yourself or your family that you previously hadn't seen
  • Confrontation with the unknown or with people or situations that challenged or threatened your old identity and values
  • Moments of crisis or critical choice that tested your mettle or your system of values
  • Choices about the company you keep and the effects of those choices on your integrity and the persona you project to the world
  • Problems accepting limitations and necessities, such as the loss of dreams, the death of intimates, the failure to live up to ideals, or the difficulty of living with a chronic illness or disability
  • Contrasts between common wisdom and your own unique knowledge or experience: doing what people said couldn't be done, failing at something others said was easy, finding value in something rejected by society, finding bad consequences of something widely valued.
  • Passages from one realm to the next: from innocence to experience, from outsider to insider or vice versa, from child to adult, from novice to expert, from what you once were to what you now are.

Other ideas: Some of these ideas come from the themes of the model essays we have read

  • Write a narrative essay that evaluates a significant experience, achievement, or risk that you have taken and its impact on you.
  • Write a narrative essay about a person who has had a significant influence on you.
  • Write a narrative essay describing a special place in your life.
  • Write a narrative essay describing a place that is “infinitely precious and worth saving.”
  • Write a narrative essay about a time you were forced to think about mortality.
  • Write a narrative essay about a time you felt deception was the best way either to protect those you care about or to maintain the respect of those important to you.
  • Write a narrative essay about a chain of events that caused you to become disillusioned about a person or institution you had previously regarded highly.
  • Write a narrative essay that narrates an unjust incident you experienced, focusing on the main conflict.
  • Write a narrative essay about a situation in which you experienced terror or alarm or in some way faced a frightening situation.