Personal Narrative Assignment
For this essay you will need to write about one specific experience that changed how you acted, thought, or felt. Use your experience as a spring board for reflection. Your purpose is not to merely tell an interesting story but to show your readers the importance and influence the experience has had on you. Remember to show your readers rather than tell them. (Anne Hart's essay “The Friday
Everything Changed” is an example of showing and not telling.
Good stories occur everywhere and can be told about anything. They are as likely to occur in your own neighborhood as in some exotic locale. Potential stories happen daily; what makes potential stories actual stories is putting them into language, recounting them, orally or in writing. Good stories are entertaining, informative, lively, and believable; they will mean something to those who write then as well as to those who read them.
All stories account for something that happened-an event or series of events, after which something or somebody is changed. As in a story, your personal essay will contain the similar elements: a character (who?) to whom something happens (what?), in some place (where?), at some time
(when?), for some reason (why?), told from a particular perspective (how?).
In other words, any time you render a full account of a personal experience, you answer what is commonly known as "reporter's questions"--the who , what , where , when , why , and how questions reporters ask themselves to make sure their reports of news stories are complete. Whether your essay is engaging or not depends upon the subject, your interest in telling it, and the skills you use to weave together these story elements.
Characteristics of a Narrative
· Narratives make a point
· Narratives convey action and details
· Narratives present a conflict and create tension
· Narratives sequence events
· Narratives use dialogue
· Narratives are told from a point of view
For this paper, you will need to have the following:
Characters : In the personal essay, your main character is often yourself, so try to give your readers a sense of who you are through your voice, actions, level of awareness, and description. The characters in a good story are believable and interesting; they come alive for the readers.
Voice: Language reveals who you are; chose your words to reflect your theme as well as yourself.
Actions : Readers learn something about the kind of person you are through your actions.
Insight : One of the best ways to reveal who you are is to show yourself becoming aware of something, gaining a new way of seeing the world, a new insight. While such awareness can occur for apparently unexplainable reasons, it most often happens when you encounter new ideas or have experiences that change you in some way. This is not the same as a tacked on "moral to the story.”

Telling Details : Describe yourself and other participants in your story in such a way that the details and facts help tell your story. A telling detail or fact is one that advances your characterization of someone without your having to render an obvious opinion.
Setting : Experiences happen in some place at some time, and good essays describe these settings. To describe a believable physical setting, you need to re-create on paper the sights, sounds, smells, and physical sensations that allow readers to experience it for themselves. In addition to telling the details that support your plot and/or character development, try to include evocative details, colorful details of setting and characters. The telling details of a setting can reveal something essential about your essay without your explaining them. After all, you can let your reader to do a little work.
Sequence of Events : In every narrative, events are ordered in some way. While you cannot alter the events that happened in your experience, as a writer, you need to decide which events to portray and in what order to present them. Remember, sequencing of events need not be chronological.
Choosing a Subject :
Writers write about their personal experiences to get to know and understand themselves better, to inform and entertain others, and to leave permanent records of their lives. Subjects for good essays have no limits. You already have a lifetime of experiences from which to choose, and each experience is a potential story to help explain who you are, what you believe, and how you act today. When beginning, you might want to ask yourself:
 Did you ever have a long-held belief or assumption shattered? Can you trace the change to one
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 event or a series of events?
Is there a particular experience that you observed that has had a profound influence on your life?
Is there a person that who has greatly influenced you?
Is there a decision that you had to make, or a challenge or an obstacle that you faced?
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Was there ever a moment in your life when you decided to reform, to adopt a whole new outlook?
How would you characterize your attempt? (Successful? Unsuccessful? Laughable? Painful?)
Here are some subject suggestions:
Winning and Losing
Winning something-a race, a contest, a lottery-can be a good subject, since it features you in a unique position and allows you to explore or celebrate a special talent. The truth is that in most parts of life, there are more losers than winners. While one team wins a championship, dozens do not. So there is a large, empathetic audience out there who will understand and identify with a narrative about losing.
Although more common than winning, losing is less often explored in writing because it is more painful to recall. Therefore, they are fresher, deeper, more original storiesto tell about losing.
Milestones
Perhaps the most interesting but also the most difficult experience to write about is one that you already recognize as a turning point in your life, whether it's winning a sports championship, being a camp counselor, or surviving a five-day solo camping trip in mid-winter. Writers who explore such topics in writing often come to a better understanding of them. Also, their very significance challenges the writers to make them equally significant for an audience that did not experience them. When you write about milestones, pay special attention to the physical details that will both advance your story and make it come alive for readers.

Daily Life
Commonplace experiences make fertile subjects for personal narratives. You might describe practicing, rather than winning the big competition, or cleaning up after, rather than attending the high school dance. If you are accurate, honest, and observant in exploring a subject from which readers expect little, you are apt to pleasantly surprise them and draw them into your essay. Work experiences are especially fruitful subjects, since you may know inside details and routines of restaurants and retail shops that the rest of us can only guess.
Other types of personal essays
As we have seen, personal narratives encompass a wide range of subject types: from the ones described above to personal observations, personal profiles, etc…Do not feel constrained to write about an experience that doesn't fit into one of the categories above; in personal writing, everything overlaps.
Selecting events
You have dozens of places to start and end your essay, and at each point along the way, may possible details and events are worth relating. Your final selections should support the theme of your essay. In selecting events, consider using one of two strategies that writers commonly use to maintain reader interest: showing cause and effect and building suspense .