Assignment Objective
Your goal in this assignment is to write a paper that explains a particular experience and the subsequent lesson or value illuminated by that experience. The Narrative Essay allows you to become comfortable with academic writing while still employing first-person perspective; you must use precise illustrations to detail a singular experience and then describe why that experience was valuable, insightful, or instructive. In this way, the narrative essay is a tool used for both illustrative writing (detailing an experience) and expository writing (explaining the significance of the experience to the reader).
Length
Your submission should be 500 to 750 words, or roughly 2 to 3 pages in length, not counting the cover page and references page.
Sources
This assignment does not require any sources. However, you may use outside sources if they are helpful to your paper. Any sources used must be cited in APA Style using in-text citations and a references page.
Details
For the Narrative Essay, you will complete the following steps:
Prewriting
- Choose a topic from the prompts below. All topics should be related to either professional or previous academic experiences. The event you choose should be a specific experience rather than a collective experience that happened over time (i.e., perhaps you will choose the work you did on a specific project rather than the body of work you completed over an entire class/professional tenure). Consider the prewriting activities detailed in Unit II Lesson II PDF, and use the methods most helpful to your own writing process to help you consider specific experiences, narrow down your ideas, and choose a topic:
- Describe an experience where you received critical feedback from a boss, instructor, colleague, or mentor.
- Describe an experience where you used innovative technology to accomplish a task.
- Describe an experience that helped shape or change your perspective and/or performance in a profound way.
- Once you have decided on a topic, spend some time thinking about what you learned from the experience, how it helped shape your professional or academic outlook, and how the lessons from the experience are relevant in your life. You will develop these ideas into your paper’s thesis, which will detail the importance of the event or experience.
Drafting
- Your paper should be organized into a clear introduction paragraph, body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. As detailed in Unit II Lesson III PDF and Unit II Lesson IV PDF, each paragraph should be arranged properly with complete sentences:
- Introduction paragraph: The intro paragraph should introduce the essay’s theme, attract the reader’s attention, and end with the essay’s thesis.
- Body paragraphs: Write at least three body paragraphs that detail the experience using precise illustrations; describe your reaction; and reflect upon the importance and relevance of the experience.
- Conclusion paragraph: The conclusion paragraph should sum up the experience and leave your reader with a final thought about its importance.
Proofreading
- Take a break from completing the paper and perform the final proofreading and editing activities. Read over your paper carefully and slowly and out loud, if possible, to identify any areas that need to be addressed for clarity, awkward wording, incomplete sentence structure, etc. Be sure to utilize the spell-check feature in your word-processing program or other tools such as Grammarly.
Stylistic Details
All essays must meet the following requirements of APA Style.
- Write using a font and size that is recommended by APA Style.
- Include 1-inch margins on all sides.
- Use double spacing (top-to-bottom every page, to include above and below titles and centered words).
- Include an APA Style title page with six-line title block. ·If you use any outside sources, include a references page at the end of the paper.
- Include page numbers (upper-right corner only).
- Adhere to the current APA Style convention and documentation style.
