Purpose
The purpose of this assignment is to practice a narrative genre and to build a classroom community through reading and learning about your peers’ stories. Narratives are an important part of our everyday life both in and out of school. Intentionally or unintentionally, as we interact with others, we engage in narrating our experiences and feelings in the various experiences. Writing about one of your important stories will help you to make sense of your lived experiences. Additionally, listening to others’ stories will raise awareness and appreciation of other people’s lives.
Assignment Goals
This assignment has the following goals:
Learning to write a concise, well-organized, and engaging story following narrative genre conventions.
Learning about yourself through thinking about and writing down your lived experiences—the experiences which shaped aspects of your social and academic identity.
Engaging in peer review activities and practicing giving and receiving feedback.
Practicing a multimodal composition by incorporating pictures, sounds, or videos into your text.
Task
In this assignment, you will compose a narrative of an important event, a person(s), a moment, an experience, a place, etc., which impacted your life. You will provide enough details about the people (characters), the setting, and the time so that your audience would be able to walk in your shoes and have a clear picture of what you have experienced. Ensure the story is something you can share in the class since you will share it with your peers and me for feedback. This story should be a multimodal text. In other words, you will have to use visual, linguistic, audio, and/or spatial modalities to deliver your intended meaning. The instructor should approve your story before you start drafting. Your story should have a purpose. It should make a point that can be connected with a larger social context.
Audience
Your potential audience is your classmates and your instructor.
Format and length
Use 12-point font, Times New Roman, double-spaced, and 1-inch page margins. Write a minimum of (1000 words). The story should have a minimum of THREE visual, audio, or spatial elements (e.g., two pictures and a song; three drawings; a picture, a sketch, and a short video track; etc.).
Some Writing Tips
Choose a creative title.
You can use the first-person pronoun (I, we) since this is a personal story. You can also use third-person pronouns (he, she, it, they) as needed.
An appealing feature of a good narrative is a detailed description. Use this wisely and effectively to build your story.
Try to narrate something enjoyable to you that can also be interesting to your audience.
Visit the writing center throughout the writing process. They can be very helpful.
Evaluation Criteria
This paper is worth 20 % (60 points) of your total grade. I will consider the following criteria for evaluation:
Engaging: (5 points): Your story is engaging and interesting for the reader throughout the piece.
Significance, focus, and connection (5 points): The story is clearly focused on a specific, significant event, person, experience, etc. The story makes a clear connection between a significant event and how it impacted your life positively or negatively.
Modalities (5 points): Your story incorporates a minimum of THREE modalities. These visual, audio or spatial elements are well integrated into and connected to your narrative.
Description and details: (20 points): The story includes relevant details about and description of people, places, experiences, etc., to enable the reader to have a clear picture of the actions, feelings, relations, time, place(s), and people involved in the story.
Awareness of the rhetorical situation (10 points): Your paper shows that you are writing for a certain audience and purpose utilizing the appropriate style and tone.
Conciseness and style (10 points): your writing is concise, coherent, and clear. You have carefully chosen your words and sentence structures with few to no grammatical errors.
Length and organization (5 points): Your paper follows the assignment-specific requirements (in your assignment sheet) and is well-organized using paragraphs, good transitions, headings (if needed).
