Narrative Elements
This is the very first sentence of your story that "hooks" your reader like a fish so they want to keep reading.
What is a hook?
An autobiography tells your whole life story from the day you were born, but a personal narrative only talks about this many special moments.
What is one moment?
If you write "I was mad," you are just telling the reader your feeling. What feeling are you telling them?
What is anger?
In this famous book, a young pig named Wilbur forms a beautiful friendship with a clever grey spider who saves his life.
What is Charlotte's Web?
Words like suddenly, later, yesterday, and next are glue words that help move the reader smoothly through a timeline.
What are transition words?
Every good personal story needs one of these—it is the problem, fight, or trouble that the main character has to fix.
What is a conflict?
While a life story takes up a whole chapter book, a personal narrative is usually this short length
What is a short story?
Instead of writing "I was scared," a third grader could write that their hands were doing this action
What is shaking?
A personal narrative must always be based on things that are this, rather than make-believe magic.
What is nonfiction?
When characters speak out loud in your narrative, their exact words must be hugged by these punctuation marks.
What are quotation marks?
This is found at the very end of your narrative, where you tell the reader what you learned from your experience.
What is a moral/lesson?
In both of these true styles of writing, this is the main character who is telling the story.
Who is the author?
To make a story exciting, you should describe what you see, hear, taste, touch, and this sense.
What is smell?
In a funny twist on a classic narrative, a wolf named A. Wolf tries to explain that he isn't bad—he just wanted to borrow this baking ingredient from his piggy neighbors.
What is, A cup of Sugar?
Instead of using boring, tired words like walked or said, a strong writer upgrades them to exciting words like stomped or whispered.
What are strong action verbs?
This is the word for putting the events of your story in the exact order they happened (First, Next, Then, Last).
What is story sequence?
Personal narratives and autobiographies are almost always written using this specific, magical pronoun word to mean yourself.
What is "I"?
Instead of just telling the reader a noise happened, authors use sound words like BOOM, CRASH, or SPLAT.
What are sound words?
If a cowboy doll named Woody wrote a personal narrative, his biggest "problem" or conflict would be dealing with this shiny new space ranger toy.
Who is Buzz Lightyear?
This is the step in writing where you read your story again to change things around, add better adjectives, and make the plot more exciting.
What is revising? (or checking your story)
This is the "secret ingredient" word that describes the setting, characters, and background information you give the reader right at the beginning.
What is an introduction?
True or False: A personal narrative must start exactly on the day you were born to be a proper true story
False.
Instead of writing "It was winter," a student could write: "My teeth chattered and my breath turned into little white clouds." This shows what type of detail?
What is touch?
If a grumpy green ogre wrote a narrative about his day, the main problem would be a bunch of fairy tale creatures invading his beloved home.
What is Shrek's swamp?
This is the very final editing step where you hunt for misspelled words, missed capital letters, and missing periods
What is editing?