American Literature / Unit 4 AML 0327 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Telling Sermon From Diary From Narrative
The idea
Three Puritan forms appear on the exam and each has a signature. A sermon addresses a present congregation as we or you, takes a scriptural text and divides it, and moves toward application: Winthrop's and Edwards's pieces both do this, though one persuades and the other frightens. A diary records dated, disconnected entries in the first person, mixes the public and the domestic without transition, and makes no argument; Sewall's is the type. A narrative tells a continuous past-tense story with a beginning and a restoration, and organizes itself by stages, as Rowlandson's removes do. The quick test is the pronoun and the tense: present-tense address is a sermon, dated past-tense fragments are a diary, continuous past-tense story is a narrative.
In practice
Address, fragments, or a continuous story.
Where people slip
A history like Bradford's looks like a narrative and behaves like an argument, since providence supplies the causation. If a past-tense account keeps explaining why God permitted each event, it is a providential history rather than a personal narrative.
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