Narration

Narration is based on the retelling of an event or idea that occurred to you in a descriptive form. It’s something everybody uses in day-to-day life without even thinking about it. Whether it’s what happened to you at a party or describing an assignment from school, you’re always using narration to get your point across.

Narration uses more than just straightforward arguments to develop a point. It involves making the reader – in the case of an essay, for example – relate and identify with the story instead of driving an explicit thesis. Through personal relation, it can be one of the most evocative methods of development.

There are three major choices that are involved in writing narration, these are:

1. Choice of scope.

   This is where the story is being identified in a specific point in time. It includes only the ideas and events that carry any significance in the sense of the story. A more effective piece can be written by excluding all of the parts that may not have complete relevance to the period in which your writing takes place.

2. Choice of detail.

   This involves placing specific details only the in the points where they would be most effective in revealing the main purpose and sentiment of the narrative. By ridding the unimportant details, the reader is given a far better, relatable text that they can, themselves, experience.

3. Choice of connections.

   This is the use of signals that give the reader a better sense of time and experience by using phrases like “then”, “at first”, “next”, and “immediately.” Any combination of these words throughout the narrative give better flow and overall a more desirable effect for the writing.

 

This was written for my grade 12 English class. Various groups were doing presentations on the different methods of development in writing. I wrote this specifically as a handout that would be given to the class before the presentation.

Node your homework.

A key idea in Charlotte Mason’s PNEU curriculum 'for British children tutored at home': after having read or discussed a text, the child should be able to restate, in their own words, what the text meant to them, whether in words or pictures.
That is, having talked about Halley’s Comet, they might speak or produce a series of drawings about how the comet might have looked down upon differing scenes in history, from the Norman Invasion onward.

Made famous by Deborah Mitford, who, one particularly dull afternoon, answered her mother that she had nothing to say about the text whatsoever.
“Not one word, little D?” Muv asked. “Can you give me so little as that?”
“Yes.”she said. “One word:’the’."

Nar*ra"tion (?), n. [L. narratio: cf. F. narration.]

1.

The act of telling or relating the particulars of an event; rehearsal; recital.

2.

That which is related; the relation in words or writing of the particulars of any transaction or event, or of any series of transactions or events; story; history.

3. Rhet.

That part of a discourse which recites the time, manner, or consequences of an action, or simply states the facts connected with the subject.

Syn. -- Account; recital; rehearsal; relation; description; explanation; detail; narrative; story; tale; history. See Account.

 

© Webster 1913.