Example of narrative composition
Answers
It should make a clear point: it should bring to life a moral, lesson, or idea.
While it is true a narrative is a story, there is more in the telling of the story. The narrative, or story, needs to make the reader feel involved, teach a lesson, help get an idea across, or feel emotionally about it. The narrative needs to explain who is in the story, tell what is happening, and when it happened. The topic sentence needs to be clear so the reader knows they are going to learn something from the story. The story itself is written in time, or chronological order, as the events occured.~ Mary M.
Common Transitional expressions used in a narrative paragraph are after, finally, soon, as (soon as), later, then, before, meanwhile, upon, during, next, when, first, now, and while.
A good way to plan for a well developed paragraph is to write out a topic sentence, then write events in chronological order and then write a conclusion. This is a good way to make sure you stay on topic and that all the events are in the correct order.
Here are some examples of a Narrative Paragraph:
Peddling On My Own
Learning how to ride a bike for the first time was a nerve racking independent moment. I was about five years old when my sister informed me that I was too old to still be riding a bike with training wheels. That was the time I decided not to depend on them anymore. Even though I had some doubt, my sister and I went outside and started to take the little wheels off my bike. After my bike went through the transformation, I was now ready for the big moment. With butterflies in my stomach, I slowly got on the bike, and with my shaky hands, I gripped the handles tightly. Meanwhile my sister was holding on to me to help keep my balance. I was so afraid the she would let go, yet I was determined to ride this bike on my own. Next with a little push from her, I started to peddle. The faster my bike went the faster my heart raced. Finally I looked back nervously and noticed that my sister let go of my bike a long time ago. I was so excited that I accomplished freedom on my bike that I forgot to peddle. The next step I remember, I was lying on the ground, yet I did not care because of the adrenaline rush. I will never forget the exhilarating moment and growing up stage of riding a bike without training wheels.
My Most Embarrassing Moment
The most embarrassing moment of my sophomore year was how I earned my nick name, Crash. It all started right after school when I turned on to the busiest street by the school. First I pulled up right behind this truck at a stop sign. After a second, a fellow older student told me that I was really close and that I was going to hit the truck in front of me. At the moment I was trying to tell the kid that I was giving a ride to to get back in the car because he was hanging out the window. Since I was distracted, I thought the long line of traffic had started to move, but it hadn’t. In the blink of an eye I hit the back of the truck in front of me. The devastation sunk in. I was so worried that I damaged the truck, but all that I did was scratch his bumper. Lucky for him! Then it came time to look at my car. My car was ruined. The hood was buckled, the front end was pushed back, and my headlights were broken. Humiliated and scared, I still had to drive my totaled care home. During School that year, I never did hear the end of what had happened that day.
My Favorite Family Experience
One of my favorite family experiences was when I went to see Anne Frank’s (a Jewish victim of the Nazi persecution during World War II) hideout in Amsterdam, Holland. I had read Anne’s published diary when I was younger, so I was extremely thrilled to actually have the chance to see where she and her family hid from the Germans for so many months. I walked up the stairs of an apartment building and into a room with only a bookshelf in it. From what I remembered from reading the diary, there was a doorknob behind the books. I found the doorknob and turned it and there was the secret annex. When I stepped into the room behind the bookshelf, I felt as if I had stepped back into history. I found Anne’s room still with pictures of her favorite celebrities on her walls. The Frank family’s furniture was still placed where they had left them in the rooms, everything just as described in the diary. I toured each room in awe of actually seeing how they had lived, yet with sadness to know how it all ended. Anne’s diary was no longer just a book to me, but true heart-felt, emotional life story written by a girl I felt I almost knew.