Personal+Narrative+Paper


 * Advanced Placement Language ** : **Personal Essay**

An event that changed your life A first An epiphany A work, school, or sport experience that changed you A conflict, which may or may not be resolved A major disappointment or success An event that you would never choose to live over again Your birth story A coming of age decision
 * Topic: ** Capture an event in your life, moment by moment, through action, dialogue and description. You may use interior monologue. Choose an experience that stands out in your memory. These events may include:

opportunity to express a distinct written voice. To implement narrative strategies including: action, dialogue, description, interior monologue, figurative language, paragraphing, punctuation, and showing rather than telling in your writing.
 * Purpose: ** To create a personal essay which demonstrates the writer as a unique person and provide an


 * Audience: ** Writing class members, writing teachers, and college admissions readers.

Version two: Rewritten as two pages double-spaced draft suitable for submission as a college essay.
 * Length: ** Version one: About three to four pages double-spaced.

1. Brainstorm possible topics. 2. Visualize setting and free-write description. 3. Visualize the event(s), and map out the story arc of action. 4. Choose scenes where you can use dialogue to heighten tension and reveal speakers’ character traits. 4. Review punctuation and paragraphing for dialogue.
 * Invention/Pre-writing: **

exposition or begin //en media res//. 2. Body - Write from the heart as you capture the moment and make it come alive with second by second details using sensory imagery, dialogue and optionally, interior monologue. Within the body of this paper, you should accomplish the following: a. Present creative and vivid sentence of varied structure. b. Use creative and vivid verbs, avoiding passive voice and clichés. c. Use direct quotations using quotation marks (new speaker=new paragraph). d. Include interior monologues and thoughts with italics if incidental. e. Convey strong emotional appeals in your writing. Make your experience come alive. f. Use various transitional devices for coherence so ideas flow logically and paragraphs connect to one another. 3. Conclusion - Give the reader a sense of completeness by bringing the narrative elements to denoument and providing a reflective element that answers the question: so what?
 * Organization: ** 1. Introduction - Begin with attention getter: place reader within the setting for your account using

on trail for its life. 2. Consider and edit for all six traits 3. Think of your audience as you compose: Without explanation, will the dumb reader be able to visualize based on the words you have put on paper? Have you conveyed a theme? Have you included soul stirring language and used appeals to ethos and pathos (possibly logos)?
 * Style: ** 1. Eliminate clutter; sometimes less is more. If the sentence doesn’t contribute, cut it. Put every word