Best Personal Narrative Essay Topics For Middle School

One of the most powerful papers that you may be asked to write in middle school is a personal narrative essay. A personal narrative is a paper that describes something that has happened to you. It is a great paper for students to write because it focuses on how you view a certain situation that has happened in your life. Since you don’t need any other resources but your memory to write this type of paper, it is a great essay to have students write because they can concentrate on the writing methods and not on finding information. When you need to decide on a topic to write about, it can be a little difficult because most people can’t really think of something that they think is interesting enough to write about. Here is a list of some ideas you can use to write this paper. Once you have chosen your topic, the next step will be to create an outline that lists the main ideas that you will discuss in your paper. Data was created with the help of Essay Writers!

For example, if you chose to write about your favorite vacation, you will want to jot down the various things that happened on your trip that made it so special. For this type of paper, you probably want to write these events in chronological order. That means to write them in the order that they happened. You are telling a story to your audience about your topic. You will want to include details in your story so that it paints a picture of the events. You want to work on describing how you felt that day and what it meant to you. It is a look into your life and your perception of the day. How did that moment make you feel? Be sure to let your reader know you through your writing. It is designed for your reader to get to know you a little better so just tell a story about a day in your life.

How authentic is it? What is the relationship between what is told and what is experienced? How do we as researchers know when something happened and when the "something" is a faction, or indeed a fiction. Above all, does it matter? If one takes CROSSLEY's approach, then yes it does. Authenticity is assumed so that coherence can be maintained over time. If an individual's outlook and future directedness changes, then it is the self which changes its story, not that the narratives told are in any way indicative of that change. However, it is quite appropriate to consider that the two aspects of this, namely the self and its narratives have symbiotic relationship. Separation of the two may not be that simple. If one acknowledges that the context of the narrative telling is important (so that different contexts will produce different narratives), then narratives can be used as an analytical tool of the self and identity. What is important here is not (strange as it may seem) whether someone is actually retelling "real" events, but what purpose the telling is promoting, whether true or not.

To claim, as CROSSLEY appears to do (but by no means the only one) that what one says is a of what really happened is to miss an opportunity to explore other ways of analysing narrative and self construction. In grappling with this issue, one question which is raised however, is to what extent an individual controls the narrative(s) of his/her life? In more… how does an individual construct their sense of self, their identity, and how much of that sense of identity is shaped and influenced by social and cultural factors? Indeed, over the last 30 years, theorists within the social sciences have begun to see the individual less as an object which merely reacts to external stimuli, and more as an agential subject, actively participating and acting upon the environment itself.

However, alongside these theories, there has been an increasingly influential theory which posits that the individual is so intertwined with a socially constructed and constituted environment that the self is seen to have very little sense of unity at all (GERGEN 1991; LASH & FRIEDMAN 1993). Indeed, a life narrative is a social construct, a "sociobiography" (GERGEN 1991), partly selective and partly fictitious, but at the same time is a means by which the individual interacts with others. One way of coming to terms with these apparently disparate theories (essentialism vs. HARRE & GILLETT 1994), where society helps the individual to develop through experiences with the world in order to be able to function in a variety of social contexts. RICOEUR (1992) for example posits that there is a need for a sense of narrative unity or coherence in order to function in the world, and that the unity so constructed must inevitably be "an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience." (p.162) This is akin to FISCHER's (1987) notion of narrative coherence and narrative fidelity.