Narrative essay is one of the most commonly written essays in the academic field. The main idea of such an essay is to tell a story and share one’s personal experience with readers. This allows students to express themselves and go beyond the boundaries of strict and uncreative scholarly writing. Apart from self-expression, narrative essays also teach an audience a lesson or provide it with an insight regarding a particular matter discussed.
Guidelines for Narrative Writing
If written as a story, the narrative essay has to include all parts inherent to a story, namely an introduction, plot, characters, setting, climax, and conclusion. For all these parts to look consistently together, one may outsource the writing based on the suggested ideas to https://essayvikings.com/pay-for-essay not to bother with the formatting and citations issues.
For the essay not to be a simple story, it always has to make a point which is similar to the thesis statement in the academic essays. If there is no significant point, there is also no incentive on the part of readers to devore their time to it. Moreover, this type of essay gives students the freedom to use the perspective and even the first person, which is not allowed in other academic papers.
Among other guidelines on narrative writing are:
- Clear and concise language. Just as in descriptive essays, narrative ones are more effective when the language is accurately chosen with particular artfulness and taste. Neither complex word nor long structures will make a text clearer and therefore should be avoided.
- Dynamic and vivid word choice. Instead of unsophisticated word choice, try to impress the reader with verbs and phrases which most precisely give a sense of a described feeling.
- Specific language instead of abstract. Abstract language is pretty much like an abstract art where the meaning of the painting is not explicitly understable and has to be dwelled upon. Same in writing, abstract language does not allow a reader to understand the matter immediately, thus has to be replaced with a more specific language.
- Active voice instead of passive. Not to bore the readers and to give them a feeling of presence, passive voice has to be avoided.
- Text organisation and structuring. Without clear introduction, it will be impossible to set the tone for the remainder of the narration. Therefore, one should explicitly show the purpose of the essay and the lesson which was learned from the described events.
- Few references. Not to disrupt the reader from the plot thread, it is better to incorporate a limited number of references. These also have to be included only in the ‘Works Consulted’ list after the essay itself.
Starting to Write
As any writing process, narrative essay has to begin with the gathering of ideas and brainstorm. In case if you are free to choose the topic, you may have to think reflectively as to which event in life to draft about. Usually, narrations have to be written about such life event which was of special importance to the writer and somehow impacted his or her further life.
When the topic is chosen and the ideas are drafted, you can start to outline the story plot and think of the characters to be introduced. For school and university assignments, it is important to keep the plot manageable, so that it does not have an excessive number of characters and does not relate to many events. It also has to be relatively limited as to the story’s timeline though in a way that allows making a point and explaining the lessons learnt.
Some experts also advise to find an antagonist for the narration. It may be either a person or any force preventing protagonist from getting what he or she desires. For antagonist to play an important role in the story, you should find out what is the reason for the opposition, in other words, what is this that the protagonist wants and cannot get. It is also possible when the writer is the antagonist himself or herself.
That is how, for the narrative story to be a good and gripping piece, writer has to develop a topic relating to his or her own experiences or significant life events. Without proper understanding of the peculiarities of the narrative style, it would be impossible to create a true narration serving educational or insightful purposes.