Reference no: EM133545593 , Length: 3 Pages

Assignment:

Objective: To create clear narrative writing that effectively uses the conventions of personal storytelling.

Minimum length: Three pages. Papers that fall below the minimum length will get an automatic D.

For this exercise, choose one of the following options:

• Tell the story of a moment in your life when a personal experience caused you to have an you to have an epiphany--a "sudden and striking realization of truth." (These types of stories are also known as "coming-of-age" tales.) This epiphany could be about yourself, someone you know, your culture, or society as a whole.
• If you think you have led a dull life up to this point, tell the story of the most interesting or dramatic thing that has ever happened to someone you know, but write it from a first-person perspective, as if it happened to you. (This is the strategy of "ghost writing" that is often used when professional writers are hired to write the "autobiographies" of famous people.) At the end of your story, include a sentence or a paragraph that explains who the story actually happened to.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Stay within your comfort zone. Regardless of what many college admission videos suggest, you do NOT need to write about the most traumatic and horrible things that have ever happened to you. Do not write about anything that you would be uncomfortable sharing with a group.
• Since your experience should include an explicit or implicit "lesson" that makes it relevant for a larger audience, avoid trivial experiences that would be more appropriate as humorous stories among close friends, such as stories about getting drunk and fighting, throwing up, etc.
• Use the principle of "in medias res"--begin the story as close to the main action as possible. So for instance, if you're discussing your athletic experiences, start by describing a championship game rather than beginning the story at age six when you first got a basketball and began to love sports more and more and more each year until high school.
• To create reader interest, remember to include relevant sensory details (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste).
• Try to answer the so-called "5 W's" of strong journalistic writing: Who is the main character? What happened? When did the action occur? Where did the main action occur? Why did the main action occur?
• Try to think of a story that will allow you to describe some kind of interesting action. So for instance, a story about When My Bad Feeling About A Co-Worker Turned Out to Be True would probably give you more to work with than The Story of When I Got Accepted to College, if the college story simply involved describing how you waited anxiously for a letter in the mail for six months.
• Feel free to use profanity in dialogue if it is necessary to describe a character or situation accurately.
• Feel free to use "I" when describing your experiences.
• To make friends and relatives realistic to a larger audience, give their names instead of just calling them "my friends" or "my aunts," etc. On a similar note, use specific names of cities, streets and countries to create a sense of realism.
• If you are telling a potentially sensitive true story about a friend or relative but don't want to feel like you're betraying confidentiality, use the journalistic tactic of the False Name. For example, say "My friend George (not his real name) got drunk and hooked up with his best friend's girlfriend at a party."
• Even though many of the sample narratives used in class discuss childhood experiences, you do not have to limit your story to childhood.
• Give your story an interesting title, not just something generic like "Paper One" or "Childhood."