Profound personal experiences or connecting events will be presented through narrative writing. In addition, opinions, deep personal feelings, or a meaningful lesson will be summarized. What is a simple and effective way to write a narrative essay? The article below will give you details on how to write this type of essay.
1. What is a narrative essay?
A narrative essay is a genre that tells a story or recounts a series of interconnected events. In particular, unlike other types of essays that only focus on presenting arguments, analyzing documents, or expressing opinions. Narrative essays often revolve around separate events or a series of personal experiences. The goal of this type of essay is to engage readers with interesting and appealing storytelling experiences.
Key elements of a perfect essay include:
- Storytelling element: The essay will create a story, often inspired by the storyteller's own life experiences, observations, or imagination.
- Chronological order: Plays a vital role in establishing a chronological order, placing events in the proper order. This builds continuity and makes it easier for readers to grasp and understand the story.
- Characters and Setting: A solid essay includes characters (real or fictional) as well as a setting to give the story substance. Then, these elements will be used to paint a comprehensive picture for the reader.
- Plot and Conflict: A narrative essay must establish a specific plot as well as present a motif of conflict or challenge. This conflict can be objective (an external challenge or obstacle) or subjective (an internal psychological struggle within the narrator).
- Presenting a point of view: Narrative writing is often presented in the first person, allowing the writer to share opinions and thoughts as well as express personal feelings. However, sometimes a third-person perspective may also appear.
- Main theme or message: A theme or message will be expressed in a story. The writer can consider and place the importance of valuable experiences and lessons from that.
- Build dialogue: Dialogue is often built into a narrative essay to help characters come alive and add credibility to the storytelling style.
- Message and lesson: Besides the plot, the essay needs to create an additional message as well as draw valuable lessons.
- Pay attention to descriptive language: Descriptive language is often used to evoke emotions and promote sensory stimulation. This will effectively connect the events in the story and help readers increase their interest in reading.
What is a narrative essay?
2. How to write narrative essay
2.1 Choose a topic
A topic for a narrative essay should recount a personal experience that is meaningful and appealing. Some steps and considerations for choosing a suitable topic are:
- Based on special, personally meaningful experiences
- Identify meaningful messages and lessons
- Try to connect with the target audience
- Sketch ideas based on different aspects of society, family, life, challenges, difficulties, personal achievements, amazing experiences, etc
- Choose a memorable event or moment
- Consider conflicts and challenges
2.2 Build a detailed plan
Once you have determined the topic of your article, continue to build a detailed plan of what you will do. In particular, remember to clearly define the purpose (to entertain, persuade, inform, or create a useful message), create a thesis statement, and pre-shape the character lines.
2.3 Develop the characters
Developing character arcs in a narrative essay is important to capture the reader's attention. You should remember that the overall quality of your essay will be enhanced if the characters are well-developed. Here are some steps to help you interestingly develop character in your narrative essay:
- Introduce the main and supporting characters, including name, age, appearance, and role
- Build background as well as related information about the character and his past.
- Create a unique personality for each character with unique characteristics, personalities, and habits. Consider what meaning or value these things will bring to the story.
- Establish relationships to create connections, conflicts, or drama
2.4 Brainstorm the plot
During this stage, you will generate ideas, explore possibilities, and organize your thoughts to create a compelling story. First of all, you need to create a main topic, build a mind map full of events and experiences. Secondly, identify key events, draw out emotional states, and lastly, explore appropriate narrative structures.
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2.5 Create tension and climax
A narrative essay cannot be successful without a climax and drama. This will help you attract readers and focus their attention on the storyline. First, you should put a few hints about the "tensions", build a character arc surrounding this event, and use emotionally evoking language to push things to a climax. Then, don't forget to come up with a solution to relieve tension, bring satisfaction, and summarize the impact of this climax on the entire storyline.
2.6 Do not forget reflective elements
Incorporating reflective elements into a narrative essay adds depth and increases personal insight, making your storytelling experience more meaningful. Then, establish a clear purpose for reflection. Next step, choose relevant events and moments. You can use the first person to share your inner monologue, consider contrast before and after, etc.
Writing a narrative essay requires a lot of elements
3. A guide to work on the narrative essay structure
3.1 Introduction
Start with a catchy hook to attract the reader's attention. A quote, anecdote, question, or vivid description will be the perfect choice for you. Note that your introduction must captivate your story and make readers excited to explore the story. Therefore, you should experiment with different hooks and writing styles to find the best fit for your narrative essay.
3.2 Set the background information
After creating the hook, add a little context to help the reader understand the setting or situation you're addressing. Strike a balance between brevity and informativeness in establishing your premise. Don't forget to highlight the main idea or theme of the story, thereby conveying the purpose or lesson summarized in the story.
Additionally, in this section, you should also identify and briefly introduce the main characters. This content will contribute to clarifying the relationship and relevance to the entire story. However, do not analyze the characters in-depth, avoid rambling and wordiness, and let the reader know the situation clearly.
3.3 Build the plot with key events
Building an engaging plot in a narrative essay will include key events that describe the content and a useful message or lesson to be learned. Some steps to create engaging content would be:
- Establish a conflict or a central theme, the core element that the events will surround
- Create a suitable timeline and logical sequence of events
- Advance the plot with iconic events
- Create unexpected, tense, sensational, suspenseful incidents
- Build up to a climactic incident, later event will be more tense than the previous event
- Offer ways to resolve conflicts and draw valuable lessons
3.4 Add depth to your characters
Attractive, dramatic, and interesting will appear when the character's appearance, style, personality or special features stand out in depth. In addition, you also build additional lines of thought or develop emotions with internal monologues. Don't forget to explore more events, history, and the past to increase complexity and create deep relationships between characters. Therefore, add a little drama to make your story more vivid.
3. 5 Incorporate dialogue & sensory details
The reader's experience will be enhanced by the effective combination of dialogue and sensory details. You can divide it as follows:
- In terms of conversation:
Use realistic conversations, and avoid being long, drawn out, or too detailed. Remember to maintain a smooth, lively flow that creates excitement for the reader. Adding a specific tone and emotion through dialogue also makes them more interesting.
- In terms of sensory details:
Don't forget to describe the experiences the character sees through the senses such as seeing, hearing, seeing, tasting, and feeling. Then, with vivid descriptions, profound adjectives, and realistic interpretations to reveal vibrant experiences.
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3. 6 Create elements to keep reader engaged
To keep your audience engaged with a narrative essay, you need some special hooks from start to finish. The most prominent are:
- Strong introduction
- Well-organized characters
- Compelling conflict
- Control the pace of the story
- Engaging conversation
- Unexpected twist
- The meaningful ending
3.7 Reflection
In this section, you will summarize the characters' moments of reflection or take away something valuable. These moments allow the audience to understand the characters on a deeper level.
3. 8 Conclusion
This is the final step of the narrative essay process. You will briefly summarize the main events and summarize the message you want to convey. In addition, you can create a provocative question to stimulate thinking or a vivid description to linger in the reader's mind.
4. Popular mistakes to avoid when writing
4.1 Overloading with details
Avoiding too much detail is key to keeping your reader engaged and preventing your story from getting too wordy. Each detail should only focus on a few main experiences with appropriate content and context, avoiding spreading unnecessary information. Don't forget to connect the main flow of the entire content and avoid being overly descriptive.
4.2 Lack of character development/ clear purpose
A lack of character development will make your story boring and unattractive. Exploring a character's personality, background, psychology, or emotions can create a certain diversity for the storyline. Through that, meaningful transformation and development of the characters make readers feel more interested. Don't forget to build a clear purpose so your narrative essay doesn't get rambling.
4.3 Weak introduction/ conclusion
Many people tend to spend all their energy or creativity on the body part and ignore the beginning and ending. Therefore, pay attention to your time and effort in researching to get through content. Avoid doing these parts in a rushed state so as not to create a superficial opening or ending.
4.4 Inconsistent chronology
Maintaining a steady chronology will allow you to create a clear and coherent narrative essay. Thus, create a logical chronology throughout the entire story, use clear transitions, and avoid vague flashbacks. Don't forget to be consistent with verb tenses so as not to confuse the reader.
4.5 Grammatical and Punctuation errors
Grammatical and punctuation is one of the common errors that usually happens. This will reflect the writer's lack of integrity, expertise, and carelessness. For that, after completing your article, it is crucial to proofread, check thoroughly, and take advantage of specialized testing tools. Besides, you also check your punctuation system and read aloud to see if your expression is appropriate or not.
5. MAAS Assignment writing service help
5.1 MAAS Introduction
MAAS Education Technology is one of the popular assignment service organizations trusted by domestic and international students/researchers. With a team of professional experts in the field of essay writing, we will provide a full range of different essay genres and needs of customers.
5.2 How can MAAS help to avoid mistakes
To avoid mistakes, MAAS will provide a team of experts with the full capacity and quality to handle the essay writing process perfectly. At that time, MAAS carefully structured the article from beginning to end, ensuring there is no superficiality in any parts. In addition, the character arcs will be fully developed from personality, psychology, style, and depth and in perfect harmony with a reasonable timeline. Finally, errors in spelling, punctuation, plagiarism, or expression will be thoroughly corrected - a perfect choice for international students for whom English is not their first language.
With the information above, it can be seen that you must be careful and consider carefully when writing a narrative essay. To avoid trouble and effort during the writing process, you can consider professional essay service from MAAS to eliminate these difficulties and achieve more optimal results.
6. References
Dr. Liliana Naydan, (2022). How Do I Write an Intro, Conclusion, & Body Paragraph? LSA Sweetland center for Writing, University of Michigan. DOI: https://lsa.umich.edu
The On-Campus Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue (2023). Steps for Revising Your Paper, Purdue OWL. DOI: https://owl.purdue.edu
The President and Fellows of Harvard College, (2024). Strategies for Essay Writing - Thesis, Harvard University. DOI: https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/thesis
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