5 Questions About My Narrative

1. What was your main point (thesis)?  “The Moral of the Story”?
The thesis of my story is that through an assignment in a creative writing class I learned to write without editing every single word over and over again, which made my stories longer.

2. Who was your audience?  What did you assume about them?  What “audience needs” did you have to consider in writing the paper?  How did you tailor your writing to them?

I thought about students and a teacher reading my narrative, so in a small patch of dialogue I wrote in your stereotypical students: the slacker and the hard worker. They were genuinely in my class on my left and right, so I thought it would be fun to write them as if they were the little devil and angel on my shoulders. For the teacher, there was a part I thought they could relate to. My character looks all over the room and even at the teacher grading and I imagined the teacher looking up and seeing me distracted. Eventually the teacher catches on and asks what's going on with me.

3. What feedback or reactions did you get at various times while composing this paper, and how was this helpful?  What other kinds of input or support did you get from classmates, teacher, tutors, others?  Were you able to make use of it?  How, or why not?

I heard that a lot of my sentences were very complicated and hard to follow. One of the last things I did when editing it was look over the entire paper and read it. Whenever it made sense, I split up the sentences into shorter simpler sentences. (Thanks Jacob) I also saw that how I aimed to connect with my audience worked, and my student annotator enjoyed my dialogue. I also got called out on using the word "hard' too many times, and saw synonyms for it all over my paper. Now I don't think I use the word hard once.

4. What did you find interesting about the process you went through in writing this paper, and what did you learn from it?

When I saw the theme for this assignment I was not at all excited, which was weird since I love to write. I read the other narratives again and disliked how far this assignment was from my usual genre: fiction. Then I got inspiration from the mini-lecture before we annotated each other's work. A narrative still needs a problem, trials, and a solution. So I wrote in a conversation, dreamt up some techniques I use now to write, and tried to make it a bit more interesting for me to read.

5. What questions do you have for me about the paper?  (What part(s) of the paper would you like me to focus on?  What do you see as the paper’s strengths, and what areas are you unsure of?)

Not to sound like an English nerd, but I would like you to focus on grammar as well as the format of the narrative. The annotations in the textbook were so vague I didn't necessarily understand what format you're looking for. As for strengths and weaknesses, I thought the balance I chose between details, dialogue, and challenges actually made the story better as a whole. However, I tend to make things complicated, and I fear Murphy's Law applies: Anything I could make overly-complicated was overly-complicated, and that was the biggest weakness.