Narrative Writing as a Genre
What
is Narrative Writing?
What is Narrative Writing?
Writing can be done in different genres. On one of our previous posts, we focused on descriptive writing. This week's focus is on narrative writing as a genre. Narrative writing involves telling a story which can be both fictional or nonfictional. In short, a narrative is a form of writing that tells a story. Telling stories is an ancient art that started long before humans invented writing. People tell stories when they gossip, tell jokes, or reminisce about the past. Written forms of narration include most forms of writing: personal essays, fairy tales, short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, autobiographies, histories, even news stories have a narrative. Narratives may be a sequence of events in chronological order or an imagined tale with flashbacks or multiple timelines.
Elements of Narrative Writing
Parts
of Narrative Writing
Parts of Narrative Writing
The parts or elements of narrative
writing include:
1. The setting is the location of the events in time and place.
2. The characters are the people in the story who drive the plot, are impacted by the plot, or may even be bystanders to the plot.
3. The plot is the thread of events
that occur in a story.
4. The conflict is the problem
that is being resolved. Plots need a moment of tension, which involves some
difficulty that requires resolution.
5. Most important and least
explicit is the theme. What is the moral of the story? What does the writer
intend the reader to understand?
Strategies for teaching Narrative Writing
1.
Let students understand stories are everywhere – events always happen to our students. Whether at home, at school
on the playground or at break time and at lunchtime and even at church.
Teachers can orally use the prompt “This
one time…” to generate ideas of stories from students.
2.
Model reading stories to students – When
teachers model students not only understand what is expected of them as
writers but, they get an idea as to how to bring their ideas across.
3.
Use graphic organizers, specifically story maps – using the graphic organizers, students are able to visualize
their thoughts, sequence the story and remember all the story elements.
4.
Implement the Writing Process – allow
students to pace their writing and write in stages.
5.
Writing Workshops – Have mini-lessons on
some aspect of narrative writing craft, then give students the rest of the
period to write, conference with you, and collaborate with their peers. During
that time, they should focus some of their attention on applying the skill they
learned in the mini-lesson to their drafts, so they will improve a little bit
every day. Topics for the mini-lesson may include:
a.
How to insert dialogues in the
story
b.
Punctuation
c.
Using sensory details and
figurative language
d.
Choosing nouns, verbs, sentence
lengths and structures and transitional words
e.
Starting and ending prompts and
a story title
Below is a link that contains several story
starters to assist your students. Be sure to modify based on the grade level
and ability of students:
Warrican, S. J. (2012). The Complete Caribbean Teacher Literacy. Pheonix: Pearson Education.Spandel, Vicki (2012) Creating Writers in the Primary Classroom: 6 Traits, Process,
Workshop & Literature (6th edition). New York: Pearson
Until next Sunday.... Goodbye!
A very interesting and informative blog. The information presented was very useful in the sense that teachers can have students view the blog to receive extra information when doing narrative writing. The use of external text features were especially useful because it gave us an idea of what that section was about. The part of the blog that was most helpful was the strategies for teaching narrative writing. It gave us different options that can be used to make sure our students are able to write creative pieces. We enjoyed this week's blog and we are looking forward to your future blogs.
ReplyDeleteI must agree with the above comment. However, the elements of the narrative writing were a refresher. We often write narratives without remember all the elements or using them correctly. Looking forward for the next blog.
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