The Language of Narrative Writing

Sometimes, in a personal narrative, you will want to give the reader a special feeling of immediacy. You will want your reader to have a feeling of being there and experiencing what is happening along with you. Often you can covey this feeling by using the present tense. Here is a writer narrating an event that he experienced thirty years ago. But he uses the present tense. The event was the Al

lied invasion of German - occupied France. He was on one of the thousands of ships that crossed the Channel from England to Normandy. (Brown 61-62)

It is three am, it is four am. We are six miles off shore… By now the enemy must know what’s up. Bombers roar overhead. Flares drop inland. I am so wrought up I do knee bends. A thousand youngsters are on board almost as inexperienced as I. It is pathetic to hear them ask my opinion. Everything’s fine I say. Now we wait three miles off shore. All nine guns point at the beach.5: 30 am. There are yellow streaks in the cloud cover. Now! The guns go off and our ship the Quincy bounces. Down finds us on Germany’s doormat like the morning milk bottle.

2.2 Objective Narratives

When someone else - not you - is the centre of your narrative, you will probably write in the third person. That is you will write “She did this” and “They did that". And since you are not the focus of the narrative, your feelings and reactions will be kept in the background or omitted entirely. This is what meant by objective narrative because objective narrative does not require a restricted, first-person viewpoint, you have an advantage. You can describe events going on in several different places, even when you are not a witness to them. Also, if you want to suggest a habitual action, an action that repeats itself, you may want to use the present tense in an objective narration.

Here is part of an objective narrative. The writer is explaining how a pioneer couple located their homestead on the Nebraska prairie in 1873.

George Cather hired a man with team and wagon, measured the circumference of one of the back wheels, tied a rag on the rim so they could more easily count the revolutions and started across the prairie. George had a compass to keep him going in the right direction. His wife sat in the back of the wagon, counted revolutions and computed mileage… When they had according to calculations, reached their homestead, they drove on a bit to what they judged to be the center of their property, just to make sure they were really on their own land - and pitched a tent for the night. (Karls J. / Szmanski R.115)

2.3 Anecdotes and Illustrations

Sometimes you’ll find that you need to support a general statement with a specific example to fully express what you mean. One way you can do this is with a brief story - an anecdote. Thus, you may include a small - scale narrative, or perhaps several, in a larger composition.

Here is an anecdote told about Jackie Robinson after his retirement from major league baseball. The writer uses it as an example to support his general statement about the character and strength of Jackie Robinson even in ill health.

He accepted the blindness and the limping with a courage born of beauty. At an old - timers’ game last season in Los Angeles, someone threw a baseball at him from the grandstands, ordering, “Hey, Robinson. Sign this”. The unseen baseball struck his forehead. He signed it.

An anecdote is a vivid way to back up a general statement. But you can’t count on always having one handy. And sometimes an anecdote just doesn’t seem to fit in. Then, rather than have your reader hang in the air with only a general statement, you should specify. You should back up your statement with an illustration. For instance, it isn’t enough to state; you need to go on from such a statement to illustrate what you mean, as this writer has done. (Karls J. / Szmanski R.120)

It happens all around us … It happened to me personally. My mother was from Poughkeepsie, New York, my mother from Marietta, Ohio, my stepmother from Washington, Pennsylvania. I was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, raised in Athens, Georgia, educated in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Ithaca, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland, and I know work in Rabun Gap, Georgia. I’ve learned a lot from all of that, but still I have no more idea of where I fit in space and time and community than if I had just landed inside a meteor from Pluto. I make my home where I am.

2.4 Narrating a Process

Narratives which are directions and explanations not only answer the questions “What happens? ” but also “How does it happen? ” These kinds of narratives follow the movement of the process from one stage to the next. You may narrate a how-to-do-it process in the first person or in the second person. For example, you may write, “I begin with a few simple breathing exercises" or “You should begin with a few simple breathing exercises”. Using the second person has the advantage of sounding as though you were talking directly to your reader, having a face-to-face conversation.

But whether you choose the first or second person, you should “walk through" the steps of your directions in your mind to make sure that they are in the right order and that nothing has been left out. You may even want to number the steps, as this writer has done in explaining how to replace a fuse.

When the fuse blows, grope your way over to the flash-light and unplug the offending appliance (usually the last one turned on before the blow).

Get your spare fuses and open the fuse box door.

When you shine the flash on the fuses you will see one with its little glass window all black and burned looking. Replace this fuse…

Numbering the steps this way works well with brief, fairly simple directions, however, you may want to use transitional words like first, then, next, and finally as you move from step to step in the process. Also, you can use words like if, when and after to introduce the conditions required from the next step, as in “After the paint has dried, apply the second coat". (Karls J. / Szmanski R.124)

You may feel it necessary to illustrate your directions with diagrams or pictures. In that case, a word of warning. Do not depend on an illustration to make the meaning of your words clear. Write so that your reader can understand you even if there are not pictures or diagrams. Make sure your directions can stand alone.

Not every explanation of a process is a how-to-do-it. Often, you will need to tell how something happens - for example, how plants make food from sunshine. Such explanations are usually told in the third person. Sometimes, especially in explaining a process that is habitual, you will want to use the present tense, as this writer has done.

In warm weather the local thunderstorm takes its place as an important water producer. It comes chiefly as a result of temperature differences on the earth’s surface. There may be many causes for these differences. For example, the dark earth of a plowed field will absorb more heat than the surrounding forest, and over this warm field the air will rise. As it goes higher the moisture in the air begins to condense into water droplets, producing the towering cumulus clouds whose contours outline the movements of the rising air. Given the proper combination of heat, moisture and subsequent chilling, the cloud will at last build up to produce a thunderstorm.

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