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Narrative Essays: Sensory Details

Narrative essays allow writers to share meaningful personal experiences with readers. When selecting an experience to write about, writers should choose an incident that provided new insights and dredge up vivid details. There are three key principles for writing narrative essays: involve the reader in the story, find a generalization the story supports, and carefully select details that enhance the story. Narrative essays typically use first-person point of view and concrete sensory details to convey their message and follow story conventions like setting, characters, climax, and ending.

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Simona Symonyci
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50 views

Narrative Essays: Sensory Details

Narrative essays allow writers to share meaningful personal experiences with readers. When selecting an experience to write about, writers should choose an incident that provided new insights and dredge up vivid details. There are three key principles for writing narrative essays: involve the reader in the story, find a generalization the story supports, and carefully select details that enhance the story. Narrative essays typically use first-person point of view and concrete sensory details to convey their message and follow story conventions like setting, characters, climax, and ending.

Uploaded by

Simona Symonyci
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Narrative Essays

As a mode of expository writing, the narrative approach, more than any other, offers writers a
chance to think and write about themselves. We all have experiences lodged in our memories
which are worthy of sharing with readers. Yet sometimes they are so fused with other memories
that a lot of the time spent in writing narrative is in the prewriting stage.
In this stage, writers first need to select an incident worthy of writing about and, second, to find
relevance in that incident. To do this, writers might ask themselves what about the incident
provided new insights or awareness. Finally, writers must dredge up details which will make the
incident real for readers.

Principles of Writing Narrative Essays


Once an incident is chosen, the writer should keep three principles in mind.
1. Remember to involve readers in the story. It is much more interesting to actually recreate
an incident for readers than to simply tell about it.
2. Find a generalization which the story supports. This is the only way the writer's personal
experience will take on meaning for readers. This generalization does not have to
encompass humanity as a whole; it can concern the writer, men, women, or children of
various ages and backgrounds.
3. Remember that although the main component of a narrative is the story, details must be
carefully selected to support, explain, and enhance the story.

Conventions of Narrative Essays


In writing your narrative essay, keep the following conventions in mind.
Narratives are generally written in the first person, that is, using "I." However, third
person ("he," "she," or "it") can also be used.
Narratives rely on concrete, sensory details to convey their point. These details should
create a unified, forceful effect, a dominant impression. More information on sensory
details is available.
Narratives, as stories, should include these story conventions: a plot, including setting and
characters; a climax; and an ending.

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