What Makes A Narrative Essay Effective: Useful Advice

A narrative essay tells a story, your story, about you or someone around you. It tells the story as it conveys some type of lesson, humor, or enlightenment. It is fun, less restrictive than formal essays, and has dialogue. You can use first and second person in this form of paper. As you get ready to compose your story, make sure you know our useful advice on what makes a narrative essay effective.

Useful Advice for What Makes an Effective Narrative Essay

• Use your voice-every writer has his or her own voice. When you try to step out of your voice, your writing is less effective and sounds phony. Find your voice, embrace it, and then use it.
• Lively dialogue-I will admit dialogue is my greatest writing struggle. In my narrative essays, I always have to work hard to convey the correct words. It is important that the dialogue is lively and fun. This can make or break a paper. Find some sample narratives that have nice dialogue in them, and model after those pieces of writing. This useful advice is vital.
• Paint a word picture-pick your words carefully. They do not need to be big and fancy words that no one understands, but they need to be the right words to paint a picture of what is happening in your narrative. This useful advice also encourages you to have strong verbs and nouns and not too many adjectives or adverbs in your story.
• Don’t preach-if your piece is trying to send the message that honesty always pays, then let the story show that honesty always pays. Do not spend a paragraph preaching about honesty. Have the characters’ actions and dialogue show the reader how important this virtue is to have.
• Appeal to people –a really effective one is one that people can relate to easily. If a person feels like they have been in a similar spot or will be in that situation, they are more inclined to read the piece. They want to learn from the story.
• And they also can relate to and enjoy the story. You want people to understand what you are saying, not to be puzzled when they finish reading the piece.
• Have fun-it is okay to have fun and you can actually laugh at yourself. If you enjoy writing the paper, the odds are great that people will enjoy reading it.