Narrative Essay Components
Theme: The essay focuses on one narrow theme or central idea. The success of the essay depends on the ability of the writer to present an idea in a complete and condensed form. It's important that the essayist develop the theme by including documented facts and a train of logical inferences that support a final statement. The theme of the narrative essay can cover any topic, serious or amusing, that's important to the writer and the reader.
Details: Details allow an audience to visualize everything a writer describes in a narrative. Using concrete descriptive language is a way to achieve that goal. When a writer uses concrete language a narrative appears clearer and easier to grasp. An example of concrete language is the sentence: The hard rain burst through the clouds, hitting my face and preventing me from seeing Mike fall to the ground.
Tone & Voice: How do you want your readers to feel? Through voice and tone, you can help readers share your reactions to the experience you are recreating. More so, craft your paper with vivid descriptions, syntax variations, and other rhetorical strategies to unveil the nature of the events and your reactions to these events.
I will refine and focus my topic by selecting one of the many strategies that I have learned in my Composition 1 class. After reading the suggestions on page 40 in our textbook for making a choice, I like the suggestions a lot. For example, writing about my family life as a child seems like a good option for me to use to select and refine a topic. I think that this strategy allows me to mainly focus on my family life in the past and present realities. More so, this strategy would allow me to ask more questions: Do you remember elementary school? Did I experience a sibling being born? Have you experienced a child of my own being born? Did we have a pet? Did we take family vacations? Have I ever embarrassed my family? Has my family...