Grade 8 Speech Unit
Narrative Speeches:
Just like a personal narrative, a narrative speech tells a story
about an influential event in your life. A narrative should
revolve around a central theme or conviction.
For example, although it is all well and good that your nineyear-old tournament team won the championship in baseball
that year, that is not enough reason to choose that topic for a
narrative speech.
Since the topic of a narrative speech should revolve around a
central theme or conviction, this experience should have
changed your life in some way.
Now, if winning the tournament championship in baseball
when you were nine years old solidified your love of baseball
and made this game become your life’s passion, well then it
was a life changing event. In narrating this event for your
audience, it should become clear to the audience what this
event did to change further events in your life.
Remember the important elements in writing a personal
narrative?
1. To entertain and inform the audience
2. To explain about a personal experience and make it come
alive through the use of descriptive details and imagery.
3. Using chronological order to organize the details.
A. Now, it is time to think. Below, list three life-changing
events that have made a difference in your life as you know it
today:
1.
2.
3.
B. Go back and re-read your three topics. Of the three topics,
which one brings to mind many images and details? Which one
do you remember with strong emotion and memory? Which
one will your audience of peers find interesting (so maybe an
event they have not heard a lot about before?) Now circle the
topic that best meets this criteria.
C. Below, make a brief chronological outline of the event. You
may use bullet points.
D. Take a look at the chronological outline. Put the most
important events in a web below. From each event in the web,
put sensory details to make the events come alive in the minds
of the listener.
E. What is the central theme or forceful conviction that the
listeners will learn from the speech? A good narrative speech
must have this.