Writing a Narrative Essay: Step-By-Step Guide

What is a narrative essay

A narrative essay is a story describing events, incidents, actions. The expressive power of the narration is in the presentation of such events in a visual reflection of the actions taking place in certain time period and space.

The narrative essay aims at telling about the development of events and their occurrence in chronological order.

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You convincing essay would include these 5 characteristic features:

• Credibility. You should describe the events as vividly as possible so they look very natural, even if they are fiction.
• Clarity. You should make the course of the events understandable for reader so they don’t get puzzled with what is happening, details and characters. For this purpose, you should keep your grammar correct and ensure verbs consistency, avoid frequent replacement of the names of the characters with personal pronouns.
• Consistency. Your text should be 100% logical.
• Stylistic purity. No audience likes it when there are a lot of verbal, grammatical, lexical mistakes in the text.
• Sequence of tenses. When writing a narrative essay you should remember the time they use for the action and adjust all the parts of the sentences to avoid mistakes leading to nonsense and semantic collapse. This, in turn, lead to reader’s misunderstanding of the happening events.  

How to write a narrative essay

You can lead the narration in the first person (“I” (“we”) or in the 3rd person, the so-called author’s narration.

The initial stage of developing your essay is making its plan. A narrative essay plan should consist of:

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1. Introductory part.

2. The beginning of the action.

3. The culmination of the action.

4. The so-called resolution

5. Conclusion.

How to work with the material

1. Select the topic you will talk about.

2. Define the theme and the main idea of ​​your future story, give it a name.

3. Select the necessary material from reliable sources.

4. Make a plan.

5. Try to insert portions of dialogue to your text, descriptive elements, and other literature methods to present the course of events and the characters of your story more explicitly.

Choosing a topic for your essay

As you probably understand, the choice of topic for your essay will set the further course for your work. If you choose the topic you are aware of, your essay will go naturally and smoothly.

Write the story demonstrating the theme of your essay

Usually, in the essay you will find a story and its analysis. No matter how specific the theme is, you will still need to describe the notion.

Please, remember that:

• In this type of essay you don’t need to include references to other sources. All the arguments should be based on your personal experience.
• This type of essay is used to help developing narrative skills and connect the events with events from personal life.

Realize your topic

Most essay topics are designed to see how well you can orient in the material and follow the guidelines.

Before you write, read the topic once again. It is more likely that it contains hints on what you should write your essay about. 

Add details

Narration is a literary piece of work; it means you have to make it as expressive as possible. For this purpose use all kinds of literary methods of description. They will make your essay sound vivid.

Make the plot clear

Remember to keep your story telling as clear and precise as possible, limit the characters and narrow the plot. Broad plots can turn your essay into a disaster because they are too big for the volume of a school essay.

Review of your essay

When you complete your narrative essay give yourself some time away from it. Then, return to your work and read it once again, possibly aloud.

Check if all the scenes are written in logical order and are interrelated.

If you don’t have dialogues in your text it is better to add some. Conversations between two or more characters will make your essay sound realistic.

Make sure your theme is covered in the story and the reader will understand what you intended to say.

Check the text for mistakes – any type of mistakes is not permissible if you want your essay to be a winning one.

Developing a conclusion

Conclusion is the last but not the least part of your narrative essay. You should pay a lot of attention when developing it since this part will leave the final impression with your audience. To make a conclusive part simply summarize the information you provided above and reword your thesis.

If you follow these tips and search for some examples of narrative essays online you will be able to compose a good essay that will be assessed with a high grade.