Narrative Essay: Unit 1: Growing Up Family Narrative Assessment Guidelines

Overview
For this assignment, you will write a two-page narrative essay about an important event in your family history. You may write about an experience from your own past, or you may write about an event from another family member’s life.
Prewriting Tips
Follow these steps as part of your prewriting for this assessment.
Brainstorm
Think about the following questions to help you brainstorm ideas for your narrative.

What stories does your family tell about your childhood? What significant events from your childhood have helped determine who you are now?
How do people in your family help each other? Is there a time that a relative helped you with something important—or any time you had to look out for someone else in your family?
Who do you admire in your family and why? What challenges have people in your family overcome?

Whether you focus on your own experiences or on those of another family member, you are encouraged to talk with your family as you gather ideas for this assessment. For instance, if you have grandparents who immigrated to the United States and you want to tell their story, schedule a time to interview them. If you don’t remember exactly how you reacted when your little brother was born, ask the adults in your family about it.
Focus Your Topic
A brief narrative is most effective if it is tightly focused on a single incident or event. Two pages is not enough space to describe a long, drawn-out experience that took place over the course of several years. Your narrative will be more successful if you focus on an event that unfolded over the course of a day or two or a few weeks at most. Here’s an example of how you might narrow a topic:

Too Broad: how my grandparents immigrated to the United States
More Focused: challenges my parents faced during their first year in the United States
Focused Topic: how my grandfather got his first job in the United States.

Organize
Your paper will include an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Effective narratives use chronological order, presenting events in sequence. Organize your paper as follows:

Introduction—Provide essential background information about your topic. State the central idea of your paper in a clear thesis.
Body—Present events in the order in which they occurred. Throughout the body of your paper, ideas and details should be clearly related to your central idea.
Conclusion—Wrap up the story and revisit your central idea. Your conclusion should give the reader a sense of why this story is significant to you.

Drafting, Revising, and Editing
Draft

Be sure to take time to work on prewriting assessments as they are presented throughout the unit. Your draft will be much stronger if you take time to plan it out rather than rushing through it the night before it’s due.
Take the time to make your draft the best it can be before you turn it in to your teacher. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should demonstrate that you have put time and effort into the assessment. Do your best to write a good rough draft now—that will help you produce a great final draft later on.

Revise and Edit

Think carefully about teacher’s feedback as you revise. You may also want to share your draft with a friend, a family member, or another adult for additional feedback. You may not choose to apply every suggestion, but give each suggestion some thought.
Your final draft should reflect both revision and editing. When you revise, you address major issues in the content, clarity, or organization of your draft. When you edit, you fix errors, smooth out awkward spots, and polish your writing. You’ll learn more about these stages of the process later in this unit.

Check the attached Sample Narrative Essay Response.