An analysis of our personal narrative Thursday, February 5, 2009

Today we looked at the structure and the order of Seth's personal narrative that we wrote together. A personal narrative needs the following:

- The first-person perspective (use the pronouns I and we)
- Be told in the past tense (use verbs in the past, for example: betrayed, started, wanted, thought etc)
- Re-tell the story in chronological order (in the order that the events took place: use words like first, then, afterwards, later, suddenly, finally, the next day, the week after etc)
- Details to re-create events and feelings
- Dialogue to re-create what people said (we didn't have time to include all that many details and our text doesn't have dialogue either, but those two ingredients make your story more "alive")

In the text I have marked the words that indicate the story's first person perspective in red. I have also marked the verbs in the past tense using bold letters. My comments are italicized.


That Night on the Bridge (the title doesn't give everything away, just the time and the place to make the reader interested)

I will never forget that night on the bridge when my best friend betrayed me. It all started because of a cigarette butt. Adam, my best friend, or so I thought, wanted to show off. He flicked a cigarette butt on the windshield of a car. All of a sudden the car came up behind us, and three guys got out. They seemed (pissed off)/upset/angry. They wanted to know who flicked the cigarette. Adam wanted to act “cool” and blamed it all on me. That’s why I was the one who was beaten up.

The first paragraph gives the order of events and answers the questions: who was involved, where did it happen, when did it happen and what happened. Everything here is in the past tense.

I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that Adam had pointed at me. I was so disappointed in him. I never thought he would go that far, and betray me like he did. I felt sorry for him because he obviously didn’t know any better. When the guys drove off I just turned around and walked away. But what Adam didn’t know was that I called the cops to blame it all on him.

The second paragraph is a reflection of Seth's feelings, thoughts and reactions to what happened. It also gives us a clue to what happened afterwards. Everything here is in the past tense.

Now two years later we are on speaking terms, but we are not friends like we used to be. I could never really trust Adam again after that night on the bridge.

The last paragraph is Seth's personal reflection looking back on what happened that day. He sums it up and describes how he feels about it today. Here the verbs change into the present (we are), since he is talking about how he feels about it today. Notice how the very last sentence refers to the title of the story.