A Personal Narrative:
A Sentence Outline of the Assignment
Describing How You Relate to an Experience:
A Personal Narrative
I. Write an introduction to the experience using a rhetorical tool describing your prompt from poetry and prose prompts given online.
A. Use a rhetorical tool to set up the point: background, analogy, anecdote, pointed question, statistic, quote in context, expert opinion, fact, or other tool.
B. Express the thesis (main idea) that you derived from the prompt.
II. Describe an experience you have had. (This may take several paragraphs.)
A. Detail the particular experience, beginning with a paragraph on the setting.
B. Enumerate the feelings it stirred up in you.
C. Give examples of how the feelings evolved (as irritation can turn to hate, or enlightenment can turn to joy).
III. Extend the point of your experience into how it changed your thinking about human nature, how the world works, or how you see your own possibilities or limits.
A. A topic sentence sets the idea and tone of this paragraph.
B. Details explain consequences.
C. Examples illustrate how the ideas played out.
IV. Explain how your new world view shapes your goals and actions for life.
V. In conclusion, sum up what you see in the experience that ties to the prompt and how it changes your world-view
On Determination (from "Living like Weasels" by Annie Dillard)
A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.
And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton-once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?