Narrative essay

Narrative Essay Assignment Your assignment is to write a well-organized multi-paragraph (at least 5 paragraphs) narrative essay responding to the writing prompt below. Your essay should be approximately two to three double-spaced, typed pages (approximately 600-800 words). Upload a rough draft by Wednesday night and a final draft that is free of errors by Sunday night.

Audience and Purpose: Think of a general, college-wide audience (your classmates, for example) as being the readers you are trying to reach with your story. Think of your purpose as trying to write an essay that you might submit for publication in Delta in Focus, LDCC’s literary journal.

Writing Prompt: Write a narrative essay that uses a story from your past experience to illustrate (or to refute) one of the following proverbs, quotations, or commonsense statements. The statement can be the title of your essay, or you can think of another title:

1. Money can’t buy happiness. 9. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.

2. Money is the root of all evil. 10. A penny saved is a penny earned.

3. I never met a man I didn’t like. 11. Small children, small problems, big children big problems.

4. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen 12. Spare the rod and spoil the child.

5. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. 13. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

6. You can’t judge a book by its cover 14. Good fences make good neighbors

7. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. 15. A stitch in time saves nine.

8. There’s no such thing as a bad boy.

Note: Your assignment is to tell a story! Be sure to let the narrative, the story, be the center of your essay. The assignment is not to explain the saying, an expository essay. The assignment is to tell a story from your personal experience that illustrates, supports, or maybe refutes the saying.

Be sure the reader can follow the sequence of events easily, and that you use vivid and concrete sensory details and images--that is what good storytelling is all about.

Grammar Notes: Keep verb tenses consistent; tell stories from your past in past tenses. It is fine to use a first-person point of view (I, me, my, etc.), but avoid using “you” as it leads to shifts in voice. Also pay close attention to your sentence structure to avoid run-on sentences