Quick Navigation
Loved by many students, the narrative type of essay allows the author to show creativity and ingenuity and to express his life experience in writing. Although writing such an assignment takes a lot of time, it is undoubtedly an enjoyable process. To write a good narrative essay, the student should familiarize himself with the requirements and guidelines for writing. In this article, we will share with you the features that will allow you to write a competitive essay and surprise your teacher with its quality.
What Is An Outline And Why is It Important?
We all know how difficult it can be to collect your thoughts for writing an essay. It is necessary to study the topic and consider such basic factors as structure, size, number of paragraphs, and general formatting requirements.
You should create a narrative essay outline to facilitate your work and correctly organize your paper. Spend enough time on this, brainstorm, and read papers on similar topics to get an idea of the format of the essay. Create a so-called layout to avoid forgetting anything and place all the desired information. The outline mentioned above serves to structure your paper, dividing it into three main parts: the introduction, the body part, and the conclusion. If creating a personal narrative essay outline still seems quite challenging for you, don't hesitate to contact specialists and buy narrative essays online, written by professional writers.
So why is a personal narrative outline so important? The plan is the trunk of your future essay tree, you can organize different branches to develop your ideas, but the plan will remain the basis and help you not to go astray in the process. But now another question emerges: "How to write a narrative essay outline?"
A Narrative Essay VS a Short Story: What Sets Them Apart
A narrative essay and a short story allow readers to explore different experiences, perspectives, and emotions. However, there are some key differences between the two genres.
A narrative essay typically requires an in-depth analysis of a particular moment or experience from the author's life. It focuses on telling an individual’s story by sharing events that influenced their thoughts and beliefs. These essays usually incorporate personal reflections and insights, making them more intimate than short stories. To paint a vivid picture, the essayist may employ strong descriptions and dialogue. The chronological structure of a narrative essay typically starts with an introduction that establishes context, followed by a series of events constructed to a climax and rounding off with a conclusion that ties everything together.
In contrast, short stories are fictional works featuring characters and settings that the author has created or imagined. These stories often contain central conflicts, themes, and intricate plot development, which builds to a climax and resolution. Short stories may also include symbolism and metaphor to create a specific atmosphere or mood.
While narrative essays and short stories provide unique opportunities for readers to engage with literature differently, they serve distinct purposes. Narrative essays allow readers to gain insight into an author’s thoughts and feelings, while short stories provide imaginative entertainment through engaging tales full of excitement and suspense.
Components of a Narrative Essay
To write an excellent narrative essay, several elements should be considered:
- Plot: At its core, a narrative essay has all the elements of classic fiction: it contains an engaging plot and engaging characters with their motivations, dilemmas, and goals; it has rising action that leads to some kind of climax or resolution; and it ends with an overall message or lesson for the reader.
- Character: Characters in a narrative essay don’t have to be fully developed people – they can be abstract concepts such as fear or anger or even objects such as a vase of flowers. However, they must all have some personality trait that helps move the story forward and gives them dimension within the piece.
- Setting: Like any other piece of fiction, the setting is integral in developing suspense and tension in a narrative essay. It should add detail and context to the chosen topic while helping propel the plot by introducing obstacles that characters within the story must overcome.
- Theme: A narrative essay should have a core theme or message the writer intends to communicate. This can be either implicit or explicit, but it should always be relevant to the story and its characters.
- Dialogue: Dialogue adds depth to the characters and helps the reader better understand their motivations and personality. The dialogue should be realistic, appropriate for the context, and properly punctuated and formatted.
- Conflict: There needs to be some kind of conflict or tension between characters to drive them toward resolution in your narrative essay. This could include physical conflicts, such as fighting between two people, or psychological conflicts, such as inner turmoil over difficult decisions or moral quandaries.
How To Start a Narrative Essay Structure, Step By Step
Let's start by deciding on the essay topic you will develop further. Of course, consider your teacher's requirements, and choose a story that will be easy for you to retell, fit the criteria, and be interesting to readers. Use the narrative essay topics list on our web if you need help choosing one.
As have already got the idea of how the narrative outline works, it's high time to design one. We've already mentioned that the narrative essay, as well as most other kinds of papers, consists of three parts. The introductory part should contain the main ideas of the essay, bring the reader up to date, and communicate the message and mood of the written work. The main part reveals the concepts described in the introduction and develops the author's opinion. In the final part, the student summarizes what he wrote earlier, and shares his conclusions.
Start with planning the body paragraphs
Despite the common habit of starting an essay with an introduction, the best way is to outline the body part first. Since the main introductory and closing reversals present the same information as the main part but in a more concise and paraphrased format. Accordingly, the most reasonable solution is to follow the procedure we have proposed. A narrative essay involves a description of some story from a life experience. Carefully study your teacher's requirements for the task, and then restore the sequence of events you will talk about. If you struggle to understand the topic, use the function to write my essay in 1 hour. In the main part, you must contain the vast majority of information and convey your message to the reader.
Plan your narrative essay introduction
When the central part of the work is done, your thoughts are already structured, and you have a complete idea of how to arrange the main paragraph of your essay. Let's take on the introductory paragraph. Start by revisiting the main content. Then work on getting the message across in the introduction and capturing the reader's attention. Although you're working with a minimal number of words, as the beginning is usually about 70-100 words long, you need to be informative.
Finish with a strong conclusion
To write conclusions, you need to analyze everything you have written before. What does the story you tell teach, what novelty does it bring, and what are the most interesting details of your story? Is there some advice that you are ready to give to the reader? Tell about all these features in the final paragraph, and summarize what has been written. Make it easier for the reader and draw conclusions for him, then your essay will bring you the desired high mark.
Personal Narrative Essay Outline Example
It is better to see a narrative essay outline example once than to read the requirements a hundred times. Let us demonstrate an example of an outline for your narrative essay. Imagine that you were asked to write the story of your separation from your parents in college. Let's create a narrative essay outline template for writing such a paper.
I. Introduction
A. When my separation started.
B. Main reasons why a young adult should get independent.
II. Body Part
A. How I started my own adult life away from my parents
B. The role of entering college in my separation.
C. Getting the first job. Main difficulties on my way. Financial independence.
D. How I started to deal with bureaucracy independently without asking my parents for help.
E. I separated, so my parents couldn't manage and alter my decisions.
F. What are the threats of not separating on time?
III. Conclusion
A. Becoming an independent individual.
B. Being ready to form my own family.
C. The importance of separation.
D. What I learned on my way to independent life.
Ideas For Writing A Strong Personal Narrative Essay
The main secret of interesting and catchy narrative writing is to be sincere and to show your individual approach. Try to choose an interesting and unhackneyed topic and bring some novelty. Search our web for useful narrative essay writing tips. Visualize your story for the reader, describe the visual images, the emotions that this story evokes in you and what exactly is special for you. The deeper you get into your own story, the better you can convey it in writing. Be logical, your thoughts should be connected and related to the topic. One thought should support another without contradicting it. It would be great if the story you decided to tell should have happened to you. Then you can more naturally and wonderfully describe this experience, drawing on your knowledge and personal conclusions that you received as a result. Use a variety of vocabulary, and avoid tautologies. If necessary, you can resort to the help of a dictionary of synonyms.
It is determined by nature that people love to talk about their experiences, and we are pleased to share our insights with someone. Why not dedicate a whole essay to this? Narrative work allows you to show your ingenuity, share your observations with the world and give advice to the reader. If you find collecting thoughts in a heap challenging, feel free to ask a specialist for help. We hope this article will help you in your further assignments and give you new ideas on how to write an outline for a narrative essay.
