Assignment: In this project, students will utilize reflections from their Joy Journal assignment on attention—as well as their reflections after their awe walk—to craft a narrative essay reflecting on their own practices and behavior around this topic. This essay can be accomplished through a variety of multimodal formats (audio, video, text). If completed as a written essay, this project should be 800-1000 words. ( i chose a written essay!).
For this essay, you should reflect on personal experiences you’ve had focusing on either joy, pleasure, kindness, and sorrow or joy & attention. Your goal is to try to communicate something meaningful about your experiences while painting a complete and compelling a picture of that experiences as possible.
Narrative Essay Tips: For this project, you’ll want to construct scenes rather than summaries of emotional states. Don’t tell us how it felt; show us what happened so that we may feel it too. This is achieved through the application of creative-writing techniques (sensory detail, setting, character, dialogue) in what we call “creative nonfiction”—real stories that are told like they’re fiction.
Connect to your audience through the story, not through rambling summary of “how it felt.” By showing us each scene—the actions, the setting, the sensory details, the detailed narrative recollection of the memory—we will sense the invisible thread without having to be told.
Concentrate on sensory details. Showing is more important than telling. “Show, don’t tell.” This is a common mantra of narrative writing. Here’s the difference:
Telling: “It made me sad.”
Showing: “I cried as I clung to the baby blanket.”
Telling: “She was a caring person, and she always made me happy.”
Showing: “She made homemade French onion soup when I was sick.
Design (Written Narrative): You must use a word processing program to complete this assignment as a written text. If you are using Pages or Google Docs, please export the files as .doc or .docx file files. I will be using the Comment and Track Changes features to edit and comment on your essay, so exporting the file is essential to providing feedback and grading this assignment.
this is how hes grading it!!!! so please hook me up and pass me with an A i really need it
Grading: Your essay will be graded based on the rubric on the final page of this assignment sheet. Some questions to consider as you finalize this project include:
- Does my project discuss a clear experience or set of experiences that utilizes the principles of narrative storytelling (i.e., “show don’t tell”; inclusion of sensory details; scenes) to draw the reader/viewer/listener into the story?
- Do I reflect on the topics from this unit (attention & awe) within my narrative essay in a way that’s clear, compelling, and meaningful to an audience?
- Is my essay well-developed (clearly organized with clear, specific ideas) and does it have minimal grammatical or sentence-level errors (if written) and minimal aural or visual errors (if completed as video or audio narrative)