In a narrative essay, a writer tells his/her audience/readers about a personal life experience or something they’ve encountered. It is a non-fiction writing that combines the act of storytelling with academic writing to convey a message. Unlike the others, the narrative essay does not require extensive research. In this piece, we take you through some tips in writing narratives and examples.
Format for a Narrative Essay
Narrative essays, like any other academic writing, takes the following format:
Introduction: This is where you introduce your topic and a brief of what readers should expect. It must contain a hook to entice your audience to want to read more.
Body: It usually comes in at least three paragraphs and gives detailed accounts of what the essay is about. The writer develops the story by introducing characters and builds up dialogues. Each section should come with something new
Conclusion: At this point, you conclude your essay by summing up the points in the body paragraphs. You should always add something catchy as a take-home for readers.
Narrative topic ideas
As mentioned already, a narrative essay should be based on personal experience or that of others. As such, you can write on varied topics, and there are several ideas to come up with. Here are some topic ideas:
- When you overcame a life challenge or fear
- A memorable experience from your childhood
- An incident you witnessed
- A life-changing event of your life
- An event that changed your perspective towards life
- Your first time away from home
- A family story
- Your encounter with a bully
- A near-death experience
- The happiest moment of your life
Tips for Writing a Narrative Essay
Writing an essay without a proper English essay help is never easy, no matter the subject. You need to pick a theme, research on it, write, and then review your work. If you want to come up with a great piece, then here are some steps to follow:
Read other people’s work
If you are writing a narrative essay for the first time, then is it best if you read the works of other writers. Doing this helps you brainstorm on the format for writing and develop ideas for your work.
How to tell your story
Find the best way to communicate with your audience to drive them with you. Narrative essays should come in the first-person pronoun, and regardless of the age group, it is meant for, get absorbed in it.
Choose a narrow than a broad perspective
Writing broadly, for example, on a summer trip can make you lose focus, and information could be scanty. However, writing on an event, which happened during the journey, like an accident or hiking event, could be exciting and a masterpiece.
Writing your essay
After following the above process, then you are good to start writing your piece. Note that you are writing for an audience, hence; let them resonate with your story. Keep it very interesting; let it flow to make it easy to follow. You can introduce other characters being the people you went on the trip with or kinds of behavior. Among them, find an antagonist, and you being the protagonist, just to keep the readers interested. You have to grab readers’ attention, so do what you can to achieve it.