Examples of Personal Narratives

For those of you who like to work from examples when you write your essays, here are some personal narratives by students from previous semesters:

"An Emergency in Croatia" --
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B59oU02C12STcjl4UEN2UUlaOTg/edit

"Another Trip to the ER" --
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B59oU02C12STUkl4eUtMM1hjRkk/edit

(Note: These essays are intended to get you started, to get you thinking about writing a personal narrative of your own. Writing like these students does not guarantee you an A. Of course, if you want to try to grade these essays on your own, based on the parameters in the Essay 1 rubric, you might start to figure out what these students do effectively and what they don't.)

Handout on Narrative Structure

For those of you working on Essay 1 who need a bit more guidance in narrative structure and in kinds of description, here is an excerpt from a short textbook that I sometimes like to use in my writing classes:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B59oU02C12STY1lKMmpUSlB3c0k/edit.

Essay 1

Here's a link to our first major essay assignment, which contains both an overall description of the assignment and a rubric that details the grading breakdown:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B59oU02C12STM0lBdnplM2dXZ2c/edit.

(Again, remember: This blog post has a label, "essay 1," which you can always click to come back to this post here, where the assignment sheet and rubric will be available throughout the semester.)