Your assignment is to think of the many different experiences you have had and to pick one which seems to be important because it sticks in your mind. In writing about this experience, you want to do two things:

1. To tell about your experience in an interesting way by being descriptive.
2. To state clearly the meaning of the experience.

Prewriting

First you must decide on a specific experience to write about. Begin by brainstorming. Brainstorming is nothing more than making a list of ideas as they come to mind. Take five minutes and make a list of the many different things you have done. Don't make judgments while you are writing. When you finish, you can chose the best the disregard the junk.

Next try clustering. Here you might pick one word or phrase from your brainstorming list and write it in the middle of a page. Draw a circle around it and then write words or phrases about every aspect of the event that you can recall. Put each word or phrase in a circle and show its relationship to other words or phrases by drawing lines to connect them.

Finally, using your clustering as a guide, tell your story in as complete and coherent a way as possible. You can treat this first attempt as a freewriting. That is, write rapidly without taking time to criticize or correct. Just get it all down, adding anything that seems important.

After a time, return to your freewriting and revise. Make paragraphs and complete sentences. Correct the order of events, add important information that you may have left out. Be concrete and descriptive. At this point you should write an introduction in which you give the reader all the information needed to understand the story. Answer the reporters questions: Who, Where, When, Why, and How. This revision of your freewriting will be your rough draft.

When you return to your rough draft, you will read through it again more carefully, correcting mistakes as you go. Again, try to make the story vivid by using descriptive words and comparisons. Also, make sure that you state the main idea. You should use a separate paragraph to state your main idea and to give it some elaboration and explanation. Since this is the most important part of your essay, it should be emphasized so that it stands out.

Structure of the essay

Your essay will have two main parts: 1)the story itself, and 2)the statement of meaning. You may place the statement of meaning at the beginning, in the middle of the story, or at the end. Where does it seem to fit best? It is always a sound practice to place the main idea of an essay at the beginning, but you can also put it within the story at a critical point where the meaning of what was happening became clear to you. Finally, it can be effective to tell a story completely and to place the statement of meaning at the end just as you put the moral of a fable at the end.

Creating a vivid picture

The way to create a vivid picture is to show your readers what is happening rather than just to tell them. You need to be concrete and specific. Describe how things looked, smelled, tasted, felt, and sounded. Use specific names for things (e. g. "Ford Taurus" rather than "car"; "hot dogs and beer" rather than "food"). For a good example of a narrative essay that both tells a story in an interesting way with concrete and specific language and states the meaning of the experience (see paragraph seven), read George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant"(web). Models of student essays can also be found by going to my links page. Click on the button below.

Length Requirement

Each completed essay must be at least 500 words. There is no limit on length, but all essays should be concise, informative, and correct. Longer essays that multiply errors simply provide more justification for a poor grade. Microsoft Word will tell you how many words there are in a document.