Guidelines for Personal Narrative Essay

Personal Narrative Essay

1. The “what” or summary
We began this project by writing the “what” of our stories. The “what” is basically a summary of what the story. Our objective is to write a personal narrative, so it should be a true story about you. The prompt was, “write about your best or worst day ever”. You may, however, write about anything you like, as long as it is a true story and it is about you!

2. Outline
We then created an outline for our essays, based on the six elements of plot:

Ø Exposition (introduction to characters and setting)
Ø Inciting Incident (event that gets the story started, introduction to the conflict)
Ø Rising Action (the bulk of the story, the events that lead up to the climax)
Ø Climax (the boiling point, the most exciting part of the story)
Ø Falling Action (wrapping up the loose ends of the story, bringing everything to a close
Ø Resolution (the final moments, the end)
This outline should have included only one or two sentences for each of the six elements. The point was to organize the basic elements of the personal narrative, not to give details.

3. Rough Draft
The rough draft builds on the outline. Each of the six elements has its own paragraph, but at this point each paragraph only needs to be 2-3 sentences. The elements of plot structure (exposition, rising action, etc.) should not be mentioned in the rough draft. You are now writing the story, so you don’t need to write “The exposition is when . . .” It should be evident from the progression of your story.

4. Second Draft Typed or Handwritten Due Friday, October 3rd
This should be your first attempt at the final product. Do your best to omit all spelling and grammatical errors. Make sure you have six complete paragraphs (5 sentence paragraph format), one for each of the six elements of plot (exposition, rising action, etc.).

5. Final Draft Typed Only Due Friday, October 10th
This is your opportunity to revise your personal narrative essay. Take my comments into consideration and correct all errors. Points will be deducted for spelling and grammatical errors.


Notes:
Remember, 5 points will be deducted for each day this project is late.

Receive one bonus point for every vocabulary word from our list that you use correctly in your essay, up to five points total.


Rubric

The six paragraphs of your personal narrative will be graded based on the list below. Your paragraphs will receive one point for each of the following criteria. Each paragraph is potentially worth 7 points; therefore, the essay will be worth a total of 42 points. Use the following list to revise your essay by reviewing each paragraph to make sure it follows these guidelines.


__ Paragraph is at least 5 sentences long


__ Paragraph stays on topic


__ Paragraph is recognizable as one of the six elements of plot structure


__ Paragraph contains descriptive details


__ Paragraph contains no grammatical mistakes


__ Paragraph contains no spelling mistakes


__ Paragraph is typed