According to Langan, “The main purpose of a narrative essay is to make a point by telling your audience a story. Colorful details and interesting events that build up to a point of some kind makes narrative essay enjoyable for readers and writers alike” (p. 195).
The narrative process can take several paths because of the imaginative, personal, and structural elements of the writer. The narrative essay has many uses such as a thoughtful letter to an old friend, a reflection on your education or ethnic heritage, childhood reminiscence, a personal event, why you decided to attend college, and so forth.
Writing narrative essays depends less on subject or structure than on the writing context and word choices used in the essay. Narrative essays can assume a personal stance, but it requires the narrative technique. The narrative technique suggests close connections among writer, reader, and subject. A good narrative essay has a relaxed style, but retains a strong structure of an academic essay. A narrative essay is written mainly for enjoyment and learning techniques, which can be accomplished by appealing to the reader’s five senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch with concrete descriptions.
A narrative essay consists of a few structural elements: narrator, order, and thesis. The narrative point of view in an informal essay is from first person perspective directed at the reader. The order is usually chronological sequence and a clearly stated thesis in the beginning paragraph and retouched on in the concluding paragraph.
A major element of a narrative essay is to use effective word because this provides the reader with a vivid image of what you are trying to say. Effective word choices are concrete words such as nouns and action verbs; adjectives and adverbs; and abstract words such as pronouns, preposition, and conjunctions. Using words correctly within a sentence and paragraph are very important in order to have concrete words to provide details in your essay as well as provide the reader with the impression that you are trying to create within your essay.
Concrete terms refer to objects or events that are available to the senses such as sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. This is directly opposite to abstract terms, which name things that are not available to the senses such as love, success, freedom, good, moral, democracy, and any -ism (chauvinism, Communism, feminism, racism, sexism, and so forth).
Examples of concrete terms include cat, chair, dog, eye patch, front door, hot, leather high heels, leather work boots, nose ring, rocking chair, sailboat, sand paper, specific colors, specific trees or plants, spoon, table, velvet, walking, and so forth because these terms refer to objects or events we can see or hear or feel or taste or smell, their meanings are pretty stable. For example, if you ask me what I mean by the word spoon, I can pick up a spoon and show it to you.
Examples of abstract terms refer to include belief, comfort, compassion, democracy, failure, faith, feelings, freedom, law, love, loyalty, maturity, memory, moral, peace, pride, power, racism, romance, sadness, sexism, skill, success, talent, thrill, truth, wit, and so forth because these terms have different meaning for most people and the words are not perceived through the five senses. For example, I cannot pick up a freedom and show it to you, or point to a small democracy crawling along a window sill. I can measure sand and oxygen by weight and volume, but I cannot collect a pound of responsibility or a liter of moral outrage.
On a final note, writing narrative essays will help students with writing other types of essays that are required in composition courses. Your narrative essay should have defining characters, setting, and action, which reaches a culmination in the middle and resolution at the end of the story. Try to find ways to involve the reader in the story and using descriptive, clear, and concise words in your essay.
If you are unfamiliar with narrative essays, the following is some examples of well-known writers of narrative essays: Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Barry Lopez.
Reference: Langan, J. (2005). College Writing Skills. New York:McGraw-Hill Companies.
