Teach Narrative Writing Successfully with This Go-To Guide
When you teach middle or high school English, you’re (probably) responsible for teaching your students three main writing types: narrative, argumentative, and informative/explanatory.
In some ways, narrative writing can seem like the easiest one to teach. Because students are making up their own stories or writing about their own lives, narrative writing tends to be relatively high-interest. Students have also been practicing narrative writing since elementary school, so they tend to feel more confident about it than they do other writing types.
But setting out to teach narrative writing can be more challenging than it appears at first glance. We all know that just because students think they’re good at something doesn’t mean they’re actually good at it. And because narrative writing tends toward the creative, it’s harder to teach students a go-to structure they can follow for every paragraph.
This doesn’t mean it can’t be done, however! We’re all about breaking down skills to be accessible and repeatable for students, and we’ve found go-to strategies to teach narrative writing that work for students of all skill levels.
What Is Narrative Writing?
Let’s start with the basics: what, exactly, do we mean when we say “narrative writing”?
There are two equally valid approaches to narrative writing in the secondary classroom.
The first approach focuses on storytelling. Students use the elements of plot to portray a series of related events that concludes with a resolution and satisfactory ending. This creative writing approach tends to be fun for teachers and students and pairs perfectly with an early-in-the-year unit reviewing those elements of plot.
We’ve found that using images as writing prompts for this kind of narrative writing leads to inventive stories, and when we’ve taught narrative writing this way, we’ve had great success.
The second approach, which we’re focusing on in this post, is a type of autobiographical or biographical writing that describes an event or series of related events but focuses primarily on their significance both at the time they occurred and in the present time of writing.
This second approach tends to be more challenging for students, but it’s also easier to systematize for them, allowing them to focus on the reflective piece, which is the part they struggle with most.
Why Teach Narrative Writing?
Full confession here: there were years that we skipped teaching narrative writing.
We have an overwhelming amount of content to cover in our content standards, and when students struggle with all of it, there isn’t always time to cover everything. In those moments of triage, we tended to prioritize argumentative writing since it’s the writing type most likely to benefit students in a variety of high school and college courses, and students often had at least some previous experience with narrative writing.
But this doesn’t mean that teaching narrative writing is unimportant.
For starters, narrative writing is a legitimate and common style of writing. We have future authors in our classes, and whether they end up writing fiction or literary nonfiction, they need the opportunity to discover and hone their skills.
Even if our students don’t become authors, they may become marketers, and in our digital world, narrative writing techniques are crucial when it comes to grabbing and holding scrollers’ attention.
And reflective narrative writing is exactly the kind of writing students will need to use for college application essays. Read any college essay guide, and you’ll see that two of the most important elements readers are looking for are specific details and reflection, things many students struggle with and that we can teach them.
One Caution When Teaching Narrative Writing
Do be aware that assigning narrative writing means you must anticipate challenging confessions. Our students struggle with a wide variety of issues in their personal lives, and it’s a rare year that doesn’t result in at least one referral to the counseling office or mandated reporter call because of something a student wrote in a narrative essay.
This is by no means a reason not to assign narrative writing: for some students, after all, this may be the only outlet they have and the only means by which they are able to get the help they need. And for many students, this isn’t a problem.
But it is definitely something you’ll want to be aware of and that you’ll probably want to make students aware of at the outset. We reminded students that while they were welcome to write about anything, as mandated reporters, we did have to report any concerns if they or someone else was being hurt or engaging in illegal activities, so, intended or not, we would take references to those situations as a request for help.
Skills to Focus on When Teaching Narrative Writing
Each type of writing has its own unique characteristics, and there are three particular skills you’ll want to focus on when you teach narrative writing:
Sensory Details
According to the ELA Common Core standards, students are expected to “[u]se precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language to convey a vivid picture of the experiences, events, setting, and/or characters.”
This is an essential part of what makes a narrative essay good rather than merely competent, and it’s the key to creating an authentic voice, which is what college application readers are looking for. Students, however, tend to be anything but precise, so you’ll want to spend time practicing using specific language that appeals to the five senses.
Our go-to strategy? Give students a treat with a multi-sensory experience like Pop Rocks and have them practice describing it using each of their five senses.
Dialogue
Another part of the ELA Common Core standards for narrative writing asks students to “[u]se narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, reflection, and multiple plot lines, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.”
No matter how many times they’ve been introduced to them, students often need a review of the rules for formatting and punctuating dialogue, so this is always a helpful standard lesson in narrative writing units. Some years, we gave students a comic strip and had them rewrite it as dialogue; other years, we played a Pixar short without dialogue and had students invent a dialogue to accompany it.
Reflection
A narrative that only tells a story doesn’t quite meet the bar of what students are expected to do: the Common Core standards specify that students must “[p]rovide a conclusion that follows from and reflects on what is experienced, observed, or resolved over the course of the narrative.”
This is, perhaps, the most challenging part of narrative writing for many students. When Steph works with students on college application essays, the first few sessions feel a lot more like therapy sessions than writing sessions as she works with students to figure out why they care about the things they do, why their activities and life experiences matter, why they are passionate about a specific subject. (To be fair, this is probably not a task only college applicants find difficult. It’s hard!)
Some students are great at self-reflection, but many are not, and so they absolutely need help and practice with this all-important skill if they are going to become proficient at narrative writing.
How to Structure a Narrative Essay
When it comes to the actual organization of body paragraphs, narrative writing is the easiest to explain: for the most part, students need to tell their story chronologically. Even if they start “en media res” with a hook that places the reader in a scene somewhere later in the narrative, they’ll need to go back and tell readers, in order, how they got to that point.
We’re talking here about a classic five-paragraph essay, by the way. Should your more advanced writers move beyond this format? Of course! But our beginning writers need a systematic approach, and the five-paragraph essay is a great starting point for them.
We promised at the outset that we’d managed to make narrative writing accessible and repeatable, and our 5C approach to writing body paragraphs can absolutely be applied to narrative writing along with our recommendations for writing an introduction and conclusion.
Introduction
Hook
Just like any other essay, a narrative essay needs to grab the reader’s attention in the first couple sentences while introducing the topic and tone of the essay. Anecdotes, lines of dialogue, and details that establish the setting work particularly well for narrative writing. (Do your students need some practice writing hooks? We’ve got you covered in this quick and easy mini-lesson!)
Context
Narrative essays need context, too. Readers appreciate it if your students can position them within the topic of the essay by explaining the general situation, making the ideas they discuss easier to understand. Students might explain how they got to the moment they used for their hook or why they’ve chosen to revisit this particular moment.
Thesis Statement
All essay prompts ask at least one question (whether implied or explicitly asked), and students need to clearly answer that question and address the significance, or “So what,” that makes it clear why this experience is worth discussing.
Body Paragraphs
For each body paragraph (again, organized chronologically), students can follow the 5C format:
Claim
Each body paragraph should begin with a statement that clearly identifies the part of the thesis being developed in that particular paragraph.
Concrete Evidence
Students should support the claim by providing descriptive details that help the reader to imagine and visualize the event or situation. This is the storytelling part of narrative writing.
context
Students should provide background information or additional information that will help establish or explain the importance of the details provided as concrete evidence.
Commentary
Here, students explain their connection to the concrete evidence and context, self-reflecting and hinting at the significance of the event overall by addressing the “So what?” portion of the event or situation. This is the crucial reflective part of narrative writing. Students don’t need to fully explain the significance in the first body paragraph, but they should start laying the groundwork for the significance that will be made clear by the end of the essay.
Connection
Students should use the last sentence of each body paragraph to move the reader from the part of the situation or event they just discussed to the part of the situation or event that will be discussed in the next paragraph. In the final body paragraph, this might just be a cue to the reader that you are about to wrap up.
Conclusion
Restate Thesis
Students will want to remind the reader of the original thesis statement but state it in a new way, perhaps by considering the details they’ve shared or the reflections they’ve included in their commentary. Students who are struggling might be encouraged to consider how they have grown or changed as a result of the event or situation described.
Synthesis
Students should then expand on the restated thesis by explaining how the event or situation impacted who they are today (or, for recent events, how they’d like it to change them moving forward).
So What
Students should end with impact, explaining the larger significance of the event or situation to their life as a whole, perhaps by considering why this event or situation was worth sharing, how it can help the reader to better understand them, or how others might see themselves reflected in the student’s experiences.
Narrative writing can be exceptionally rewarding for teachers and students. It tends to be fun to read, as the personal nature leads to more variety than an argumentative or informational prompt does. And for students who successfully navigate the reflective part of the assignment, it can be a really valuable way to understand themselves and their experiences in a more meaningful way. Our stronger writers will benefit from the freedom to structure their essay in ways that best suit the story they want to tell, but for our learning writers, a structure like this one helps them to feel successful when they have no idea how to begin.
Implement this structure with your next narrative writing assignment with our Personal Narrative Essay Outline. The resource includes a teacher presentation that walks students through the structure presented here and provides a sample essay to illustrate what each sentence should look like, a visually attractive outline of the narrative essay structure that students can keep in their binders (or that you can post on their LMS), and a graphic organizer students can use to draft their own narrative in this format. If you need mini-lessons on sensory details and writing dialogue, you can find those in our Fictional Narrative Writing Unit Plan.
If you have any questions about what we’ve shared here or you’ve implemented our ideas and want to share how it went, we’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.