Writing Project Essay: Write a paper in which you discuss some specific aspect of your experience with language
Analyze some way or ways in which words have affected you. (More details can be found on page 196 of the text.) This essay will be another narrative whichoffers you the opportunity to think and write about yourself, to explain how your experiences with language led to some important realizations or conclusions about your life or about the world. Each of us has had meaningful experiences that have taught us lessons about ourselves or others or the world. As with all narrative essays, you will have the chance to record and share those experiences.A narrative essay usually involves a trip down memory lane and an awareness of how the insights gained at the time have helped shape your present experience.
Guidelines for a narrative essay:
1. Build your narrative essay around a central experience, a main idea that your story then supports and explains. This experience should be significant enough to bring about a change in your outlook concerning an important aspect of your life. For example, an experience that was extremely difficult to undergo, but which created a tremendous sense of self-confidence in you, would be good subject for a narrative essay. Conversely, an experience about a trip or a vacation, no matter how interesting, which did not affect your thinking in any significant way, would not be a suitable subject for a narrative essay.
2. Include only those incidents and details that contribute relevantly to the central experience of your essay.
3. Narratives are usually written from the writer’s perspective, and use the first person pronoun “I”.
4. Bring your narrative to life by including vivid details, and dialogue.For example, Instead of writing “he told me to leave”, write, “Get out!” he thundered.
5. Keep in mind, though, that dialogue and descriptions should be used selectively to highlight key scenes.
6. Clearly indicate transitions of time and place so the reader can easily follow the sequence of events.
7. Your narrative essay should conclude with some remarks about the insight or transformation your experience left you with.
