College Composition / Unit 20 CMP 0491 review, 2 to 3 minutes
A Practice Draft: The Narrative
The idea
A practice narrative shows how revision keeps time, order and point of view consistent while improving sentence flow.
In practice
This practice draft is constructed for this course. It is a short personal narrative: "My first day at the food bank, I arrive early and nobody was there. Then a truck pulled in. The driver asked if I could help unload. I said yes. We carried boxes for an hour. By noon, you could see the shelves were full. I realized I had found a place where I belonged." Work through it as a reviser. First, the governing tense is past, so arrive should be arrived. Second, the sentences "The driver asked if I could help unload. I said yes. We carried boxes for an hour" are short and choppy; combining two of them, "When the driver asked if I could help unload, I said yes," varies the rhythm without losing the action. Third, "you could see the shelves were full" shifts from first person to second; write "the shelves were full," or "I could see the shelves were full." Fourth, check order: the events run in time order from arrival to noon, which suits a narrative, and the final sentence states the point the story builds to. The revised narrative holds one tense and one point of view, and its sentences vary in length while the story moves forward.
Where people slip
Do not combine every short sentence in a narrative. Short sentences can speed up action, as "I said yes" does; combine where the rhythm is monotonous, and keep short sentences where they create pace or emphasis. In a narrative, the reader should feel the morning moving, and a mix of short and longer sentences is what creates that movement.
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