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Essay Organization: The Personal Narrative is organized with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It should read like a story–with an exposition, a rise action, a climax, a falling action and a resolution or denouement. While the Personal Narrative is certainly less formal than other academic essays, the point or moral of the story (i.e. the thesis) should be very clear to the reader.
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Transitions: The Personal Narrative utilizes paragraph breaks and transitional words and phrases that help the audience (or reader) flow in and around the story. Read more about paragraph transitions in Appendix A.
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Character Description: Develop the characters in the story so that the reader has a clear understanding of the people in the story–even if the one person in the story is YOU. Help your reader learn about the characters both by what they say and by what they do.
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Sensory Details: Develop a sense of imagery within the story using sensory-driven details. In other words, create a vivid story by helping the reader to see, hear, taste and touch just as the characters in your story do. Sensory details bring your readers into the story–into the experience you are sharing with them.
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Dialogue: Use internal and/or external dialogue to connect the characters and help propel the story forward. Dialogue helps the writer to “show” rather than “tell” the story to the reader. Tips for formatting dialogue can be found in Appendix C.
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The Thesis (the message driving your story): Your story’s point or purpose should be structured as a thesis statement. And this statement should be underlined. As the direction of your story must be made clear to the reader, it would naturally make sense that the point of your story or thesis appear somewhere within the first paragraph.