Narrative Worksheet; Week One In preparation for your Narrative Essay (due Week Two), choose one of the Writing Suggestions and complete the following tasks: Read pp, 289- 293 and choose one of the following pre-writing activities: Free writing, Listing, Clustering, Cubing or Questioning. If you choose to handwrite your activity, take a photograph with your phone and attach it along with your submission. 2. Create an Outline (Follow graphic below) It should be one sentence for each step. 3. Compose an introductory paragraph and highlight or underline the main idea 1. Choose one of the following topics: • • • What personal goal or achievement are you most proud of? Share the story of the moment you reached that goal. What one event brought you closer to your family? Describe that day. Was there an event in your life where you made a mistake or misjudged a situation? Describe how the event occurred and what you learned from it. Background A narrative should share a larger lesson with the audience beyond simply retelling an event. A strong narrative focuses on a single event or conflict and builds from introduction to body to a resolution. Descriptive language brings the reader into the experience; consider carefully how you describe each scene. Show—don’t tell. Telling informs the reader by stating facts. “She was angry.” Show describes a scene. “She grabbed the wilted flowers and threw them in his face.” Telling repeats a list or series of actions, often without stopping to describe what happened. Showing shares concrete sensory details to capture the scene in which the event takes place. Literacy Narratives pages 83 - 85 Generating Ideas and Text, Chapter 27 pages 289 - 297 Learning Objectives: Compose, define, describe and organize elements of a narrative. Rhetorical Strategies As you plan your essay, you will want to think about the rhetorical strategies by which you will present your ideas and evidence to readers. These strategies, sometimes called rhetorical modes or techniques, help a writer organize evidence, connect facts into a sequence, and provide clusters of information necessary for conveying a purpose or an argument. You might choose to analyze the cause of an outcome, compare one thing to another, classify your facts into categories, define a key term, describe a person, place, or phenomenon, explain how a process works, or narrate a pertinent event or experience. Cause and effect Focusing on causes helps a writer think about why something happened; focusing on effects helps a writer think about what might or could happen. Cause is oriented toward the future; effect looks back to the past. Compare and contrast Comparisons look for similarities between things; contrasts look for differences. In most uses of this rhetorical strategy, you will want to consider both similarities and differences—that is, you will want to compare and contrast. Classify and divide Classifying and dividing involves either putting things into groups or dividing up a large block into smaller units. Define Defining involves telling your reader what something means—and what it does not. It involves saying what something is—and what it is not. As a strategy, defining means making sure you— and your readers—understand what you mean by a key term. Description Description uses sensory details to help the reader "see" the event you are writing. When writers describe a person, place, or thing, they indicate what it looks like and often how it feels, smells, sounds, or tastes. As a strategy, describing involves showing rather than telling. Process Explains how something is done by sharing in order step by step to complete the process. It can be everyday processes like how to write a letter, how to play basketball, or how to make French fries, or more complex actions like how to change a hard drive. Narration Narration may be the most fundamental strategy. We tell stories about ourselves, about our families, and about friends and neighbors. We tell stories to make a point, or to illustrate an argument. Jeff Gremmels, “The Clinic” Every Wednesday, as part of my second-year medical student • experience in Rockford, I travel north to see patients at the UIC University Primary Care Clinic at Rockton. Early this past winter, I was handed the chart of a new patient and I was told I was seeing him for “stomachaches.” I closed the door to the sterile white examination room to face a thin, pale young boy, fourteen years old • and sitting on the exam table with his knees pulled to his chest. His head jumped as the exam door snapped briskly shut. I introduced myself and crouched at eye-level next to him. He tightened the grip on his knees. “What’s wrong?” Silence filled the bleach-tinged air, and his eyes stared at me, unblinking. “He’s not eating anything, says his stomach hurts.” The voice • came from the mother in the corner of the room. I hadn’t even noticed her as I entered, all my attention focused immediately on the tensed figure on the bed. “For the past two weeks, it’s been nothing but cereal, and only a handful of that.” I listened to the mother sketch a history of nausea, stomachaches, and absent stares. It gave the impression of more than the typical stomachache, and I plied ahead, waiting to finally ask the key question that slipped the knot • on this mystery and sent the bacteria or virus or swallowed garden flower culprit plummeting into my lap. The knot refused to give. “Where did he get the bruises?” I ventured, hoping to unearth some bleeding disorder with a forgotten manifestation of gastrointestinal symptoms. The mother looked at the scattered marks around the red-head’s temples through her friendly librarian glasses, then up at me. “He’s very active, normally, and gets into all sorts of spots. He comes in from the woods with new cuts and scrapes every night. • You should have seen him after the big rains, all mud and torn jeans.” With this she looked back at the alabaster boy huddling on the bed and smiled with the memory of his past spirit. A professor teaching our physical diagnosis class told us we should know 80 percent of the cases coming before us by hearing the first-person point of view descriptive details set the scene and focus on the patient dialogue provides information narrator did not know Narrator introduces a key conflict into the plot Mother uses present and past perfect tenses to refer to earlier actions by her son; narrator uses past tense to describe mother’s actions in the exam room • history alone. This case was quickly proving itself the undesired 20 percent. I moved to the physical exam. The boy was not keen on the concept of my examining him, and made his desires very clear as he refused every request to look up at me or to open his clamped mouth. I wanted to solve this puzzle and began to insist more forcefully until finally, with his surprisingly strong mother, I managed to pull his loose shirt over his head. Beneath that shirt lay pale doughy skin, its spongy texture belying the taut musculature beneath. On the surface of the skin was a continuation of the light bruising around his temples. As the mother sat down and the boy resumed his curled-ball posture, my eyes picked out almost one-dozen small, red “U”s, with two small bars between the uprights like a German umlaut. Raised and bright, more like a rash or burn than a bruise, I hoped these would be the clues I needed to solve my mystery of the afternoon. Further examination revealed nothing more than a continuation of the pattern down to his ankles. I combed my cloudy memories of past lectures for anything • reminiscent of this strange mark as I walked up the hall to find a doctor. The search failed to exhume any diseases with ties to Germanic vowels. As I explained my cryptic findings to the attending physician, I saw her eyes quickly open, contradicting my belief that she was actually asleep. Pushing insurance papers towards me, she quickly stated, “I’m going to look at him. I want you to have the mother fill these out in the waiting room.” I followed her white lab coat to the exam room and completed my assigned mission. I returned from the waiting room—despite the mother’s distant protests of having already completed the same forms—to find the attending physician on the phone and admitting my patient directly to hospital care. Twenty-five minutes later, I again sat in her office, listening to the diagnosis. “The wheels of a lighter, a disposable lighter, leave those two umlaut marks—nothing else looks like it. It’s almost always abuse in his age group.” I couldn’t think of any reply, and we spent several minutes gazing into the carpet, silent and introspective. Events in exam room presented in chronological order transitions increase suspense, then lead to climax of plot I left the clinic alone and went directly to my apartment, missing the evening lecture on “Insulin and Diabetic Control.” Four days later, I went to the hospital to see the boy who was • once my patient. I read the psychiatrist’s chart notes slowly, rereading the passages describing the boy’s abuse by his stepfather and his three-year history of self-mutilation and depression. It never entered my mind, so avid for a solution, to ask for a history of hospitalizations or illness, and I felt the cavernous shadows of my own missing knowledge hinting at their depth. My focus had always been on the disease, the physiologic atrocity accosting the patient’s unsuspecting organs and cells. This was my first glimpse into an arena I had utterly neglected—the patient’s psyche—quietly present in everyone and in every disease. Entering the boy’s room, I found him asleep, an IV pole standing sentry over his frail visage. I picked up a crumpled note from the floor, smoothing it to reveal the young patient’s shaky handwriting: I wish I were a paper airplane, Soaked in gas, shooting red flames, burning with an orange glow, over all the people below. I could fall through the sky like a comet or a meteorite. I could become a UFO, become someone I did not know. • Years of lectures, labs, and research could not match the education I received in five days with this single boy. Jeff Gremmels, “The Clinic.” Reprinted by permission of the author. More transitions lead to narrator’s final understanding of events Narrator’s main point in telling the story Rhetorical Modes As you plan your essay, you will want to think about the rhetorical strategies by which you will present your ideas and evidence to readers. These strategies, sometimes called rhetorical modes or techniques, help a writer organize evidence, connect facts into a sequence, and provide clusters of information necessary for conveying a purpose or an argument. You might choose to analyze the cause of an outcome, compare one thing to another, classify your facts into categories, define a key term, describe a person, place, or phenomenon, explain how a process works, or narrate a pertinent event or experience. Cause and Effect This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA Focusing on causes helps a writer think about why something happened; focusing on effects helps a writer think about what might or could happen. Cause is oriented toward the future; effect looks back to the past. Compare and contrast Comparisons look for similarities between things; contrasts look for differences. In most uses of this rhetorical strategy, you will want to consider both similarities and differences—that is, you will want to compare and contrast. Classify and divide • Classifying and dividing involves either putting things into groups or dividing up a large block into smaller units Define Defining involves telling your reader what something means—and what it does not. It involves saying what something is—and what it is not. As a strategy, defining means making sure you—and your readers—understand what you mean by a key term. Description Description uses sensory details to help the reader "see" the event you are writing. When writers describe a person, place, or thing, they indicate what it looks like and often how it feels, smells, sounds, or tastes. As a strategy, describing involves showing rather than telling. Process Explains how something is done by sharing in order step by step to complete the process. It can be everyday processes like how to write a letter, how to play basketball, or how to make French fries, or more complex actions like how to change a hard drive. Narration Narration may be the most fundamental strategy. We tell stories about ourselves, about our families, and about friends and neighbors. We tell stories to make a point, or to illustrate an argument. CHUCK CHUCK RIB RIB SHOULDER BREAST ALL ANIMALS HAVE THE SAME PARTS HAVE GO A HEART VEGETARIANCHUCK CHUCK RIB RIB SHOULDER BREAST ALL ANIMALS HAVE THE SAME PARTS HAVE GO A HEART VEGETARIAN
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