Narratives

Narration

As a mode of expository writing, the narrative approach, more than any other, offers you a chance to think and write about yourself. We all have experiences lodged in our memories, which are worthy of sharing with an audience. Sometimes they are so fused with other memories that a great deal of the time you spend in writing a narrative is in the pre-writing stage. In this stage you need first to select an incident worthy of writing about and second, to find relevance in that incident. To do this, you might ask yourself what it was about the incident that gave you new insights or awareness. Finally, you must dredge up details, which will make the incident real for your reader.

Principles

Once you have selected an incident or event, you need to keep three principles in mind:

First remember to involve the reader in the story. It is much more interesting to actually recreate an incident for the reader than to simply tell about it.

Second, find a generalization that your experience supports. This is a way to help your personal experience take on importance to your audience. This generalization doesn’t need to include all humankind; it can be about yourself, men, women, or children.

Third, you should remember that although the main component of a narrative is the story, you should carefully select details that will support, explain, and enhance the story.

Conventions

1. The narrative is generally written in the first person (I); however, the third person (she, he, it) can also be used
2. The narrative relies on concrete, sensory detail and description to convey the point.
3. Because the narrative is basically a story, it should contain these story conventions: a climax, and ending, and a plot including a setting and characters. All of these help you make your point.

Speech Delivery

Here in the Writing Center we deal with more than just writing, we also are capable and ready to handle the problems of anyone working on a speech. We have created a series of tip sheets to not only help your speeches be more on point, clear, and concise, but to help battle stage fright, create effective visual aids, and in the areas of speech preparation. The Writing Center houses a place for anyone to come and test out their speech in front of a camera so that they can see how effective their presentation is as well as get feedback from a tutor.

Here are a few helpful guides on speech delivery ...

Steps in Public Speaking (Page 1 and Page 2)

Speech Delivery Check List

Speech Fright (Page 1 and Page 2)

Visual Aids

The Praxis

1. The Praxis is a teacher certification examination written and administered by the Educational Testing Service.
2. Tot be a certified educator in the U.S. qualifying scores must be earned on all parts of the Praxis I and certain areas of the Praxis II Content Area Assessments.
3. The Praxis I consists of three exams: reading, writing, and mathematics.
4. In the reading test 50% of the questions deal with comprehension, 30-40% are analyzing the material, and 10-20% are evaluating the passage.
5. In the writing test 50% of the score comes from a 30 minute writing response, and 50% is composed of answering multiple choice questions about grammar, sentence structure, word choice and mechanics.

• Here is a link to the Writing Center's tip sheet on the reading test.
• Here is a ling to the Writing Center's tip sheet on the writing test.

Adapting to the Audience

When giving a speech, presentation, or in writing a paper one of the major concerns you should have is your audience. Who is your audience, you ask? Your audience is the majority of the people who will be hearing, seeing, or reading your work. Audiences can be friendly (they like what you are saying), neutral (they don't care what you are saying), or hostile (they dislike what you are saying). Each type of audience merits a different approach to how you deal with your information.

Here is a link to a tip sheet with some helpful hints for each of these three audience types provided by the Writing Center.

EDIT:: I would add that there are two more categories that an audience falls into: knowledgeable and un-knowledgeable. This factor determines the kind of language you use and the level of explanation terms merit. With a knowledgeable audience (e.g. an article in a national physics review) the language tends to be more academic and technical with a greatly reduced amount of explanation with terms. With an un-knowledgeable audience (regular papers and articles) the language uses more vernacular and general terms. If any technical terms are introduced they are explained in the course of the writing.

Introductions and Conclusions

The introduction and conclusion are the bread in a paper sandwich. While they may not be the most flavorful parts of the writing, they are certainly needed to keep everything else together. An introduction grabs the readers attention and shows him or her where the paper is going. It briefly outlines some of the main points and creates a clear tone and position. While the conclusion gives the reader a brief synopsis of the paper without repeating any information or introducing any new information. It also gives the reader a sense of finality by directly answering any questions proposed in the introduction.

Here are the Writing Center's tip sheets on the introduction and the conclusion.

Online Library Resources

UCA's Torreyson Library has a variety of online resources beyond what already lies in print within the library. These include field-specific journals and databases that can really improver your research and add a greater depth and scope to your writing. This is not to say that you will always find what you are looking for online, and in many cases you will need to seek the physical books or journals in the library or on inter-library loan. However, here is a quick tutorial on how to use the online databases.

Cover Page, Steps 1 and 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, Step 6, Step 7, Step 8, Step 9, and Step 10

Setting the Hook

Ask the reader thought-provoking questions
In June of 1948, The New Yorker published “The Lottery,” a story by Shirley Jackson. Within days the magazine began to receive a flood of telephone calls and letters, more than for any other piece of fiction they had ever published. Almost all of those who wrote were outraged or bewildered—or both.
Why did this story provoke such a reaction? Why does it still shock readers?
Perhaps the answer lies in Jackson’s ability to depict so well the surface appearance of civilized society and the actual brutal, barbaric nature that lies just beneath this veneer.

Set the Scene, but don’t forget the punch!
It is a small village, a quiet one, where folks farm and square dance and buy coal to heat their houses and dutifully send their children to school. And these same folks, men who borrow tools from each other and women who exchange recipes, families who attend fund-raising pie suppers and Halloween programs, these folks get together every year and brutally murder one of their neighbors.
Who are these people? They are creations of Shirley Jackson, who created such a town and such a folk in “The Lottery.” But these people are also you and I, for Jackson makes clear in her story that the casual inhumanity exists in all our lives.

Use relevant quotations
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right…”
These are the screams of Tessie Hutchinson and the words with which Shirley Jackson concludes her short story “The Lottery.” But it is not Tessie’s voice which remains even after the story is over; it’s Old Man Warner’s. “There’s always been a lottery,” he explains, seemingly vexed that others might question its continuance. This statement, set against the barbaric stoning of an innocent person, points us to one of the story’s compelling themes: a tradition is empty and meaningless when the reason for its observance has been forgotten.

Become a part of the paper
I didn’t understand. Why was Tessie saying something about the drawing being unfair? Didn’t she want to win the lottery? I read on, continuing to be puzzled by everyone’s relief at not drawing the winning ticket. What kind of lottery was this, anyway? By the end of the story I knew. And it made me angry, angry not only at these villagers who would do something so stupid, but angry too at Shirley Jackson, the author of “The Lottery” who had brought me to this unexpected ending. Looking back through the story, however, I realized that Jackson had worked hard from the very beginning to create the ironic twist that makes the story’s conclusion so compelling.