Writing a Narrative Essay.

Useful information for my 2º Bachillerato students:

A NARRATIVE ESSAY

Basic qualities of a narrative essay:

·               A narrative essay is a piece of writing that recreates an experience through time.

·        A narrative essay can be based on one of your own experiences, either past or present, or it can be based on the experiences of someone else.

·                  In addition to telling a story, a narrative essay also communicates a main idea or a lesson learned.

First steps for writing a narrative essay:

·                  Identify the experience that you want to write about.

·                  Think about why the experience is significant.

·         Spend a good deal of time drafting your recollections about the details of the experience.

·                  Create an outline of the basic parts of your narrative.

Writing about the experience:

·                  Using your outline, describe each part of your narrative.

·                  Rather than telling your readers what happened, use vivid details and descriptions to actually recreate the experience for your readers.

·             Think like your readers. Try to remember that the information you present is the only information your readers have about the experiences.

·              Always keep in mind that all of the small and seemingly unimportant details known to you are not necessarily known to your readers.

TENSES

A narrative describes an event that happened in the past. We use the past continuous, the simple past, and sometimes the past perfect to describe what happened.

Past Continuous  The past continuous is good for setting the scene

Past Perfect  You can use the past perfect to describe something that happened before another thing in the past. 

Use connectors to organize information in narratives

Sequence connectors	Time expressions	Time connectors
At first, firstly, first of all, to begin with, secondly, thirdly, finally, in the end, afterwards, after that, then, next	Last winter/summer, a month/year later, the next morning, that afternoon, on the following/previous day ...	when, while, before, after, until, during, as soon as, by the time, once

Note:

♦ use sequence connectors to show the sequence of events in a story or a report of an event. They introduce a sentence and take a comma immediately after the connector. 

♦ use time expressions to tell exactly when these events happened. They introduce sentences. 

♦ use time connectors to show the connections between the events in the story. A complete clause follows these connectors