This PowerPoint discusses the basic guidelines for a narrative descriptive paper of the kind that I want you to write for paper 1. The first guideline to keep in mind is that your paper needs to have a point. A narrative is just basically a story, but it's more than just a series of events. I could tell you the story of my day up to this point, and I could do this in excruciating detail with lots of description, very, very vivid, but because nothing really important has happened to me today, it wouldn't be a very good narrative paper.
A narrative needs to have some sort of conflict built into it so that something happens to that main character who in this case is probably going to be you that changes that character in some way over the course of the paper maybe they change their attitude about something maybe they learn something really important but just something happens that the character that's on the last page the paper is somehow different from the one that's on the front page now the good news here is that I've given you an assignment or I will be giving you an assignment that has this part built into it. So as long as you pick something that fits the assignment that I give you, it's going to have that conflict built in there and there's a point that you should be making with that story. Next, you need to make sure that you have a consistent point of view. I think since the stories in these papers are going to be about you, I think you should use first-person point of view because you're going to be telling things that happen to you. So saying, I did this, then I did this, and so on and so forth, just makes sense to me.
If, however, you're not comfortable with a first-person paper, and sometimes people aren't, you can do it from third person. So you could, you know, tell the story as if it's happening to another person. Or I suppose you could even tell a story that did happen to another person as long as it fit the assignment. But most people...
first person is the best choice and you want to be consistent with that. One thing to really watch out for in terms of keeping your point of view consistent is sentences like this one. When I was in labor, the pain was the worst you ever felt.
So the first part of that sentence is in first person when I was in labor and then the second part of it is in second person. The worst pain, the pain. was worse that you ever felt.
Now that's a problem for a couple different reasons. Number one, first and foremost, we don't use second person point of view in academic writing. So the word you probably should never show up in the paper unless it's in quotation marks in dialogue, which we'll get to later.
The other reason is that it makes this sentence literally not make any sense. If I read this sentence on a paper, when I was in labor, okay that's the person who's having the baby. The pain was the worst you ever felt, so now they're talking about me.
Well, obviously, when people were having babies, I didn't feel a thing. So this sentence really doesn't even literally make sense. But this is exactly the kind of shift in point of view that you're going to be tempted to write.
Narrative papers are the worst ones that we do in terms of having to write it differently than you would say it out loud. When we tell stories out loud, one of the things we tend to do... is use second person point of view. I don't know why, that's just the way we tend to talk.
So even though you know you're supposed to be doing first person in this paper, you're going to be tempted to just kind of drift off into that second person. If you know that up front, that's fine. You know, don't worry too much about it as you're actually writing the paper out, but go back and do one edit that's just looking for shifts in point of view. You could even control F on your paper.
and just search for the word you, and every time it pops up, make sure that it's either in dialogue, and if it's not, change to something else. Next, you want to make sure you also have a consistent verb tense. Again, since most of these stories that we're going to tell are things that have already happened, to me, it just makes sense that you would tell them in past tense.
It is another one of those things though where when we tell a story out loud we tend to do it in present tense. So you say something like I walk into the room and then I look around and I see my buddy sitting over in the corner. Instead of saying all that in the past tense which is where it literally would have happened.
So either way is okay. Past tense is probably better and certainly past tense is easier to stay consistent with. This is a good example of the kind of sentence I see a lot of times where the student started off doing what they were supposed to, but got caught up in the story and kind of drifted off.
Ralph was always mean, but on that night he was being particularly hateful. When he got to my house, he marches in without knocking and helps himself to a drink. So you see how this sentence or these sentences started off in past tense. Ralph was mean. He was being hateful.
He got to my house. But then in that... back end of that second sentence marches in, helps himself to a drink, it shifts over to that present tense the way someone would probably tell the story out loud. So again, just look for things.
I would probably also do an edit that's just based on this particular issue. Look at every sentence, look at every verb, make sure that they're in the right tense for the situation and you should be fine. For the organization of the paper, everybody's going to use chronological order, which just means, of course, time order, putting the events in the order that they actually happened.
If your paper starts at the beginning, ends at the end, and never deviates from the chronological order, that's fine, that's great, no problem. If, however, you want to do something a little fancy with a flashback or something like that, that's okay. Just be aware up front that that's hard to pull off.
A lot of times, sometimes it sounds like a better idea than it ends up being. So think carefully about that before you do it. I'm not looking for anything fancy. And the main thing is that at the end of the paper, there should be no question about what order the events happened in, even if you do try to do a flashback or something in the paper itself.
So just be as clear as possible. And if you get towards the end of the paper and you realize you've forgotten something, back earlier in the story that needed to be mentioned. By all means, don't stick it in right there. I've read papers like that where it says, oh yeah, and by the way, three pages back, I should have told you this.
Go three pages back, stick that stuff in where it belongs so that the paper just moves in the order that it's supposed to. One of the most important aspects of this assignment is your use of sensory details. Sensory details are just those pieces of information in the paper that are derived from your five senses.
So you're going to explain what things look like, you're going to explain what things sound like, you're going to explain what things smell like, and you want to use a lot of these details. This is the area where most that break between the A papers and the B papers usually shows up. The A papers will have a lot of vivid and really carefully chosen sensory details, and the B papers will have a little bit less.
So if you're looking for a spot to really focus some attention, this would probably be a good place to do it. Just think as you go through, and the good thing about this is you can go back and do this even after you've drafted the paper. So you know you see that you've mentioned a car for instance. Well, don't just say it was a car. Tell me what kind of car it was.
What color was it? What condition was it in? Just describe things.
You know, don't stop the whole story just to describe a car. But if you can work that in and make it sound pretty natural, it just makes the paper a lot more vivid for the reader. Obviously, you're never going to describe things so much that the reader's going to see exactly what you saw at the time that the story happened.
But the more detail you put in there, the closer they can get, and the closer they get, the more... They're going to feel like you felt when these events were happening, and that's what we're going for here. As you choose the sensory details you're going to use in the paper, you want to make sure that you're picking things that focus on the dominant impression or the main point that you're trying to make in the paper.
You know, if the story is something sad... Well, maybe it's a rainy day. Maybe you describe it that way, even if it really wasn't.
You know, we get that general tone for the story from that description, and it just reinforces what you're trying to say. You can do this with all kinds of things. Let's say you're at a restaurant, and you're having a conversation with somebody, and it's not a very good conversation. There's some tension in this.
Well, you... You might want to include because it's a restaurant, you know, the dominant feature probably in that setting is a smell, is what the food smells like. So, you know, maybe it's your favorite restaurant or where this really happened it was and it smelled great.
But because you're wanting to reinforce how tense this conversation is, maybe you're going to describe those smells as not so good. Maybe something rotten smelling or, you know, moldy carpet or something like that. So that you're not, you know... Right.
It'd be bad to have this like really tense heated conversation and everybody's mad at one another. And then you say, oh, and I could smell this lovely bread that I love so much in the background. It's a little disconnected.
So pick those sensory details based on what it is you're trying to get across in the paper so that they will kind of back it up rather than take away from it. Also, you want to use dialogue for important conversations. And what that means is, rather than just say what the conversation was about, you show us the actual words that the people in the conversation said. You know, you could say that Bill and I had an argument. And okay, that gets the story, kicks it on down the road, and gets us a little closer to the end.
But if you tell us, you know, Bill screamed at me and said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then threw a chair, and then I yelled back at him, da-da-da-da-da. Well, that's a lot more vivid.
Again, it's sort of the same thing with the sensory details. We're trying to put the reader there as much as possible, in a front row seat for that story. And if they can actually hear what was said, then that's going to be a lot more vivid for them. And, you know, obviously you didn't take notes when these things were happening back in the day, and that's fine. And if you...
You know, even if you just kind of have to make up some conversations to sort of show what was going on then, that's okay too. But don't just say that there were things happening. Tell us what was actually going on.
That's going to make the paper a little bit more informative. When you use dialogue, it does bring up a few technical issues that we need to pay some attention to. So bear with me, there's quite a bit of stuff on this slide.
And if you need to go back and listen to this one a couple times, make sure you do that. Okay, first thing, look where that skinny red arrow is. I see it's pointing at the word he.
What that is to show you is that when you switch speakers in dialogue, you start a new paragraph. And that paragraph would be indented just like every other paragraph would. Now please hear what I said there. It's when you switch speakers, not necessarily when the first person talks in a conversation.
So on this page, we're pretending like we've come in in the middle of this conversation. In other words, he said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is not the first thing that was said in this conversation. It's somewhere in the middle.
When the first person started talking, maybe that was the beginning of a new paragraph. Maybe it was stuck at the end of another paragraph. It just depends on the situation. But once the conversation starts, every time you switch to a different speaker, you start a new paragraph.
And you indent that half an inch just like you always would. Now skip down a little bit and look at the green arrow. Most of the time, because people don't tend to speak in really big chunks, some people do, but most people, when they're in an actual back-and-forth conversation with somebody, it tends to be in pretty short bursts. So usually what somebody says is going to fit on one line.
If it doesn't and it carries over to the next line, remember to treat it just like any other paragraph. So she said blah, blah, blah, blah, all those blah, blah, blahs, going right back out to the left margin with the second line, and we would with the third if there was a third and so forth. Sometimes when I say indent half an inch when you switch speakers, some people hear me say... indent all of your dialogue half an inch.
And that's not the way it needs to be done. It's just like every other paragraph that you use. Alright, back up to the fat red arrow up there pointing towards the big B and the blah. That's to remind you that those blah blah sections, the actual words that the people said, when those words were said, those were actual standalone sentences.
Obviously the people who were talking didn't say, he said blah blah blah blah, she said. blah blah blah blah blah, they just said the words. So since those were originally standalone sentences, they would begin with capital letters just like every other sentence does, and because we're quoting exactly the way it was said, we're going to capitalize the first word of those spoken sentences as well.
So you can see the one I've marked with the fat arrow, and you can look at all the others and see that I've done it the same way. Alright, next look at the circles that I've put in there. And what I'm trying to show you with those is that when you put punctuation at the end of quoted material, that punctuation goes inside the quotes.
That's not always true, but for this paper it is, probably. If there are exceptions, we'll deal with those as they come up. But if it's a period or a question mark or an exclamation point or a comma, those go inside the quotes at the end of a quote.
quoted section like that not floating around out there in space where they're going to drift off Alright, now look at the black box. And the black box has some information that's not actual quoted words. What you want your dialogue to look like is a normal, natural conversation.
And if you don't continue to narrate and tell the story and describe things as you're going through the dialogue, it's going to look like your people were just standing there face-to-face, taking turns talking to one another. And that's not the way conversations really work. While people are talking, they continue to eat, they continue to drive, they continue to clip their toenails, whatever it is that they're doing, they don't stop that just so they can talk.
Now they may pause, and you can put all kinds of little variations of this in there, but don't just put the words that were said. Keep describing things, and especially in an instance like that, she gestured menacingly with a curling iron. If this is a, I mean that tells you right there, even though you don't even know what the words are being said, this is some kind of...
argument and it just helps reinforce that tense tone that you're going for. Now if you look at the blue box right under that, what you see there is an instance where I didn't want to put my acknowledgement phrase, my he whimpered part at the beginning of the sentence. I done he said and she said at the beginning of the previous two sentences. I got tired of doing that so I want to flip it around. In fact, You're probably going to want to do this.
In fact, if it's absolutely clear who's talking, you don't have to have the he said or the she said or the whatever. Those sound pretty awkward most of the time, and if you can do without them, that's great. If not, by all means, put them in there if you have to have it, but if you can do without it, that's fine. If you put it at the end of the sentence, though, as the one with the blue box shows, make sure you put a comma, as you see there in the circle, after the quoted.
material inside the quotes and then put your acknowledgement phrase which obviously is not capitalized because it's in the middle of the sentence now and then the period at the end. One sort of wrinkle with that is the blue arrow next to last line and in this case I had the acknowledgement phrase after the quoted material again but this time it needed an exclamation point. This would also be true of a question mark had it been a question in that set of quotes.
In this case, I'm going to put the exclamation mark or the question mark inside the quotes, and there will be no comma involved like there is in the sentence above that in the blue box. It's the same situation in one way, but punctuationally it's a little bit different. One thing also to be aware of, if you see that she with the black arrow pointed towards it, If you've got the autocorrect stuff on Word doing its thing, what's going to happen there is that Microsoft Word is going to see that exclamation point inside those quotes.
It's going to think that's the end of a sentence and it's going to capitalize that she on its own even though obviously that's not the end of the sentence. It's the middle of the sentence, but the computer's not smart enough to know that. So just watch out for it.
If it does that make sure you go back. and change that to a lowercase whatever it is. Now, obviously, if I put the person's name there, Debbie screamed, then it wouldn't matter, but because I've used a pronoun, it does. Okay, so we just learned that when you switch speakers in dialogue, you start a new paragraph. As far as other paragraphing guidelines, there's just not a lot in narrative papers.
There's no real clear... In consistent rule, this says you have to start a new paragraph every time you do such and such, except with the dialogue. That's about the only real rule there is, and even, you know, fiction writers break that one all the time.
All of our other papers, there will be really specific guidelines about when to start new paragraphs and what each paragraph should be doing and that sort of thing. But this time, you're kind of just left to do it however it sounds good to you. other than with the dialogue, my recommendation is that anytime one sentence tells something that happened a significant amount of time after the previous sentence, in other words, when you jump ahead in time just a little bit between sentences, then I would start a new paragraph there.
That will get, between that and the dialogue rule, that'll get you by for most of the paper. kind of look at it at the end though after you've drafted it out and if you see any huge chunks that aren't that are just one big paragraph you know look for a good place to break them up if you can't find one that's a good thing to talk to me about and i can help you find one you know there's the good news is unless you just like start a new paragraph with every sentence it's hard to mess this part up but i know sometimes beginning writers like really firm rules to follow because it makes you feel like Everything's under control and you don't unfortunately have one this time. So just kind of do the best you can with it and ask me if you have any questions. Also keep in mind that what we're writing with this paper is what we call creative nonfiction.
In other words, we're starting with a story that's basically true, but we're going to change it any way we need to in order to get across the point that we're trying to get across. You know, if your story is about how ticked off somebody made you because of something they did, we don't want things in there that show some of the really nice things. You know, unless you're Distinctly trying to set up a comparison.
Here's what they used to be like and now here's what they're like. That'd be fine, but we don't want things in there that distract from that main point or that contradict that main point as much as possible. This kind of goes back to that slide about focusing on the dominant impression.
It may have been a perfectly sunny day the day that your best friend stole your boyfriend, but that's not helping back that point up. It was a nasty day when your best friend stole your boyfriend, even if it wasn't, because that helped set the tone for a sad story. And obviously you can be ironic with things too. Sometimes bad things do happen on sunny days because you don't expect them to, and that's all right too, but you know what I'm saying.
Just change whatever details need to be changed. Make up whatever details need to be made up in order to get that main point across. You've only got three pages to do it.
So you gotta hammer it home every chance you get. And finally, even though you're hammering home that main point as much as possible, I want you to show me what that main point is instead of telling me what it is. And it almost sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but I don't think I am.
So let's say your main point is that... Your best friend, who you thought was this great person, turned out to be a real jerk. Okay. I don't want you anywhere in that paper to say, my best friend, who I thought was a nice person, turned out to be a real jerk.
Just tell what happened. Give me the, or show me what happened. Show the events. Narrate the events that occurred, and then I'll know that that person that you thought you liked turned out to be a real jerk. What happens is, a lot of times, I'll get these...
You know, three pages of just perfect narration, lots of sensory detail, beautiful dialogue, everything's great. And then there'll be a paragraph at the very end of the paper that says, So as you can see, I learned that my best friend that I thought was great turned out to be a real jerk. Well, they just spent three pages showing me how this person stole their car and robbed a liquor store with, you know, their baby in the backseat and then stole their credit cards and went on a spending spree across three states. I don't need to be told that this person is not a good person. I get that from the story.
So you're just not trusting your reader if you need to do that. It's going to be hard to resist. You've been taught since you were a little kid.
Every paper starts with an introduction. Every paper starts with a conclusion. And after this one, I'm going to say that's absolutely true.
But for this particular assignment, you don't need that. You don't need that introduction that tells everything that's going to happen up front. You don't need that conclusion.
This is going to come back and sum everything up for us. It's a story, and stories are more powerful than explanations usually, so I don't really need that. Just tell the story.
If you just can't help yourself but to write that last paragraph, to get up on the soapbox and tell me what I should have gotten out of it, that's fine. Write that thing. Put it away for a couple days, and before you turn it in, go in and just delete that thing.
Don't even read it again. Just delete it. And then I promise you the paper will be better off for it.
We just don't want to be too explicit. We want to trust the reader to see what's going on without having to be beat over the head with it. And if you pick good details and you focus on that dominant impression like we've talked about, it's going to come across crystal clear.
A lot of times I'll have paragraphs, or not paragraphs, papers where the title says, How My Best Friend Turned Out to Be a Real Jerk. And I think, why am I even going to read this paper now? I know what the whole thing's about, so why should I bother to read these three pages? So don't ruin it for me. Be a little cagey about it, and then when I get to the end, I'll see what you're about, and it'll be good.
Anyway, so that's it for the narration description. If you have questions, obviously you may get in contact with me, and we will see what we can do about them. Thanks.