Personal Narrative Essay

Unit 1 Assignments
English 102
Relationship to Course Objectives
In this unit, you will explore various parts of the writing process, use Groundwork Assignments to generate and develop ideas, learn to determine your rhetorical situation and create and modify your work accordingly, write a traditional narrative essay.
Major Writing Assignment 1
Introduction & Prompt
For this first assignment, you will create a three and a half to four-page narrative essay that explores the places, communities, or people who have shaped or changed you in some way. This narrative should include your personal experience wherein you tell one story of how a place, community, or person has shaped you into the person you are today. (For example, some students explore how a grandparent shaped them for better or worse, while others might examine how a community such as a sports team impacted their life.) Be sure to focus on an actual story with a beginning, middle, and end. The best essays tend to focus on a single person, community, or place. Do not focus on an object.
Your focus for this prompt could be a neighborhood, a friend’s house, a football team, a mentor, etc. Keep in mind that you want to focus on a story and how that place, community, or person shaped you in some way. It is very important to stick to this assigned prompt, so if you have questions, please reach out to me. After identifying the story you want to share, consider the elements of plot you will include. Effective essays will describe setting, people, background information, and include the key plot components of conflict, climax, and resolution.
Your essay can also include traditional components of creative writing and should, in fact, include at least one exchange of significant dialog.
Elements of Major Assignment 1
Topic: Tell a creative non-fiction narrative pertaining to a specific place, person, or community

Process: Using GAs 1 and 2, develop a narrative essay with a plot

Audience: You should write the piece to an audience of your peers. Remember, in order to write to your peers, you will need to adjust which examples you choose and the type of language you use. You may write slightly less formally to meet the needs of your audience, but your piece should not have distracting grammatical errors. Since this is a narrative, it is appropriate to use “I,” but you should not use “you.”

Purpose: The purpose of the piece is to explore the genre of narrative while learning more about audience, purpose, and plot. Additionally, we will explore the concept of revision.

Format: The format should be a narrative essay format. Focus on telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end that has sufficient details so that the audience has a full picture. Be sure to use MLA formatting for the GAs and the MA Final Draft.
Length: The final narrative essay should be a minimum of three and a half full-text pages.

Works Cited: No Works Cited will be needed for this assignment.

Revision: Assuming you meet your deadlines, you will receive feedback from your peers and from your instructor throughout the process. Use that feedback to revise your paper, making major improvements to structure, organization, details and support, development, clarity, etc.
Unit 1 Groundwork Assignments
Groundwork Assignment 1
In order to prepare to complete MA 1, read the following example of a narrative essay. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/englishcomp1v2xmaster/chapter/student-essay-narrative/
Paragraph 1: What parts of this personal story were interesting, and which parts could you connect with?
Paragraph 2: Reread the prompt for MA 1. What person, community, or place do you think you will focus on for your own narrative essay?
Paragraph 3: Briefly summarize the events of the story you are thinking about telling for MA 1.
Be sure that your work follows the MLA format (12-point font, 1-inch margins, indent paragraphs, heading, header, title, double-spacing). Save your work as a Word document (.doc or .docx) or .pdf . I cannot open Mac files, so if you are working from a Mac, be sure to save in one of the correct formats. (I CANNOT open a .pages document and cannot assess shared documents. You must upload the specific file in the correct format for me to assess your work. Work submitted in the incorrect format will receive a zero and 24 hours to correct the issue and resubmit.) Do not send a Google Doc link. Download a copy of the document to your computer, and upload it to the dropbox. ALL documents submitted for the course should follow the rules listed here in #5.
Groundwork Assignment 2
Write the narrative essay that will tell the story of how the place, community, and/or person you chose to explore shaped the person you have become today. Most well-developed rough drafts will be about three pages in length. Keep in mind that this is part of the drafting step, so it doesn’t have to be technically perfect. Review the narratives discussed in class, your textbook, and posted on D2L.
Be sure your narrative has elements of plot and story. (There should be a beginning, middle, and end as well as description of people, setting, conflict, climax, and resolution.)
Some area of your narrative should include dialog (a conversation in quotation marks between two or more people). Since this is a personal story, there’s a chance you may have forgotten the exact wording that people used in these conversations. Do your best to recall these words.
There is no specific number of paragraphs needed. Indent as appropriate when you move to a new idea or topic.
Be sure that your work follows the MLA format (12-point font, 1-inch margins, indent paragraphs, heading, header, title, double-spacing). Save your work as a Word document (.doc or .docx) or .pdf . I cannot open Mac files, so if you are working from a Mac, be sure to save in one of the correct formats. (I CANNOT open a .pages document and cannot assess shared documents. You must upload the specific file in the correct format for me to assess your work. Work submitted in the incorrect format will receive a zero and 24 hours to correct the issue and resubmit.) Do not send a Google Doc link. Download a copy of the document to your computer, and upload it to the dropbox. ALL documents submitted for the course should follow the rules listed here in #5.
Submission Guidelines:
Unless otherwise directed, all work should be submitted as a Word Document (.doc or .docx) or as a PDF. Use the standard MLA format with a heading, header, and title. Use a 12 point font of Georgia or Times New Roman. Double-space your work PS: It is three different assignments but they all tie into the major writing assignment

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