Essay 3 – The personal narrative 500 – 1000 words

Most students have been writing stories throughout their educational career, and storytelling is most students’ favorite form of writing.

For your third essay, you will be telling the story of an incident or event that happened to you. Hopefully, after the event, you were a wiser and smarter person.

Therefore, the story you tell for Essay 3 must have a lesson that you learned. This lesson will become your thesis or last sentence in your introduction.

Need help? Visit this helpful web site about the narrative essay:

The web site will include two helpful student models.

Getting Started – Generating ideas

Once you have chosen the story you will tell for Essay 3, begin the prewriting process. Some students will simply freewrite – . They will begin telling the story in one quick fast draft. This technique will put pencil to paper and end with a rough draft.

Another technique is to draw a time line and enter the events of the story in chronological order. This technique will help insure that you write the events of the story in the order in which the events occurred from beginning, to the middle, to the end.

Another creative prewriting technique is to draw a picture of the most important part of the story. Once you draw the scene, then begin writing descriptions and facts to help you recall important details.

Spending time in the prewriting stage is an important part of the writing process –

First draft – Once you are ready, begin writing the story! Look at your prewriting to be sure that you have included all of the details and important components of the story.

Organize your essay – The structure of the narrative

Just like Essay 1 and Essay 2, your essay needs an introductory paragraph –

This web site provides 16 ways to start your introduction:

Just like Essay 1 and Essay 2, your introduction should end with your thesis statement. Your thesis is the main idea of the essay. What did you learn? Or what was the impact of the story? Or how did this chain of events impact you? Or how were you different after this event?

The body of the narrative essay is the telling of the story. The first body paragraph should begin with the time and place of the story. Be sure to use past tense verbs. Your body paragraphs may be shorter, and you may have as many as three, four, or five or more body paragraphs to tell the story. The story should end in the last body paragraph.

Finally, once you have completed telling the story, you will end your essay with the concluding paragraph. For this essay, you may discuss the consequences of the event. You may return to the lesson you learned or the impact this story made on you. You may discuss the future.