short story vs narrative essay

Skip to main content. by Kori Morgan Personal essays and narrative essays are two genres that give you a chance to showcase your life experiences and beliefs with readers. In spite of this similarity, though, they have many differences. While a personal essay focuses on reflection and personal growth, a narrative essay emphasizes the elements of a story to bring the overall experience to life. Reflections and Lessons While both genres require you to think critically about your experiences, the core of a personal essay is inward reflection about yourself. This includes insights you have gleaned about your abilities and strengths, significant personal growth you made and what you still need to work on. For example, a personal essay about volunteering as a camp counselor might center on how the experience helped you grow as a leader. In contrast, a narrative essay moves outward, examining how specific people, places and ideas have influenced the way you view the world. Emphasis on Story As its name suggests, a narrative essay is built around the story of a particular experience. Using the elements of setting, characterization, plot and description, you recreate your experience for readers in a dramatic style that grabs their attention and stirs their emotions. For example, the narrative essay version of your camp counselor experience might focus on your relationships with the children you worked with and develop them as unique characters. A personal narrative, on the other hand, incorporates only the most significant details, placing a stronger emphasis on its reflective element. Actions Personal and narrative essays also focus on different kinds of actions. In a personal essay, which focuses on your personal reflections, the decisions you made and how you responded to a situation can be key pieces of evidence as you evaluate that situation's effect on your life. In the.
A narrative essay is a form of creative writing that presents a story, typically from the point-of-view of the writer.  Narrative essays are also known as personal essays because they often describe an event or series of events in the life of an individual. Those unfamiliar with narrative essay form may mistake a narrative essay for a short story, since a narrative essay is a brief text that tells a story.  However, learners should be clear on the difference between the two genres: a short story is a form of fiction, meaning it is made up.  Narrative essays, on the other hand, should always reflect the true events of a person's life.  Despite their differences, however, narrative essays and short stories employ many of the same writing conventions.  Both are creative forms of writing, and thus require the writer to engage readers both aesthetically and emotionally.  To do this, the writer has to compel the reader to keep reading by making the text engaging. One of the most important things to remember when composing narrative essays is to use vivid, descriptive language.  Descriptive language consists of words and phrases that produce images in the mind of the reader.  Just as reading a short story is boring unless the reader can picture the setting and the characters and understand the way the characters feel, a narrative essay is boring unless the reader can truly see the events taking place and feel why they are significant.  Descriptive language includes adjectives and adverbs (describing words), but also figurative language.  Figurative language is language that creates images through comparisons or suggestions, such as metaphors and similes.  Figurative language can be very effective in portraying people, scenes, and events.  Consider the difference between the following two descriptions: Laura's hair was long and brown and Laura's hair was like a horse's mane.
When facing a task of writing a narrative or expository essay, the first thing you should do is understand the difference between these types of papers. Narrative Essays: Tell a Story In simple terms, a narrative essay is a story meant to entertain the readers. This writing style is extremely versatile, because it has almost no limitations. Every piece of fiction out there is an example of a narrative essay. However, this doesn’t mean that these stories are purely fictional. If the author tells a story based on personal experience or historical facts, it will still be considered a narrative essay, as long as the work complies with the essential requirements that pertain to this style of writing. They are: Switching between points of view of different characters (optional) Combination of concrete and abstract language No definite chronology of events, flashbacks, etc. (optional) Abundance of personal pronouns Simple structure common for fiction stories (setting, characters, conflict, plot, resolution) When you are writing a narrative essay on some particular subject, the story should be centered on it without deviating to other areas. Expository Essays: Inform and Explain There is no room for fiction and descriptive literary tools in expository essays. These papers are fine examples of informative articles and instructions. The style of expository essays is concise and simple. All in all, an author should aim to make the essay as clear as possible and edit it in order to remove all information that isn’t strictly necessary. The most common examples of expository essays are: Directions, scientific articles and other texts that follow the cause-effect structure. Recipes, biographies, history texts that follow some definite chronology. Speeches (mostly political) and other types of texts that are based on the pros versus cons structure. Some newspaper articles that.
The genres of short prose writing can be very confusing. For example, some writers will call their personal essay a story, and others will call their essay a memoir. To make matters even more complicated, a number of literary magazines are beginning to accept what is commonly called mixed genre writing. It’s important to understand the difference between the types of short prose, whether you’re writing an essay, short story, memoir, commentary, or mixed genre piece. What is a short story? A short story is a work of fictional prose. Its characters may be loosely based on real-life people, and its plot may be inspired by a real-life event; but overall more of the story is “made-up” than real. Sometimes, the story can be completely made-up. Short stories may be literary, or they may conform to genre standards (i.e., a romance short story, a science-fiction short story, a horror story, etc.). A short story is a work that the writer holds to be fiction (i.e., historical fiction based on real events, or a story that is entirely fiction). Short Story Example: A writer is inspired by a car explosion in his town. He writes a story based on the real explosion and set in a similar town, but showing the made-up experiences of his characters (who may be partly based on real-life). Short Story Example two: A writer writes a story based on a made-up explosion, set in a made-up town, and showing the made-up experiences of his characters. What is a personal or narrative essay? What is an academic essay? What’s the difference? Though factual, the personal essay, sometimes called a narrative essay, can feel like a short story, with “characters” and a plot arc. A personal essay is a short work of nonfiction that is not academic (that is, not a dissertation or scholarly exploration of criticism, etc.). In a personal essay, the writer recounts his or her personal experiences or opinions.
“Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays,” E.B. White remarked in his reflection on the art of the essay. And yet there must be a reason why the essay is what we turn to when we set out to assess human potential, as in college applications, and discuss matters of cultural charge, as in op-eds. For Annie Dillard — modern mystic, sage of writing, champion of the creative spirit — the essay is not only an immensely valuable genre of literature, but also a pinnacle of thought and a hallmark of the writer’s aspiration for significance. In the introduction to the altogether excellent anthology The Best American Essays 1988 (public library), which she edited, Dillard explores the misunderstood merits of the essay, a form she considers to be the short form of nonfiction, much as the short story is the short form of fiction. She places particular focus on the narrative essay — a genre that “demonstrates the modern writer’s self-conscious interest in writing” — especially narrative essays that “mix plain facts and symbolic facts, or that transform plain facts into symbolic facts.” A great many narrative essays appear in the guise of short stories My guess is that the writers (quite reasonably) want to be understood as artists, and they aren’t sure that the essay form invites the sort of critical analysis the works deserve. Her aspiration in editing the volume, Dillard notes, was to coax essay writers “out of the closet.” Comparing the extinction of the essay with the shrinking of other literary forms — including a particularly ungenerous but, perhaps, tragically accurate account of poetry’s role in the literary ecosystem — Dillard presages the rise of the narrative essay: Poetry seems to have priced itself out of a job; sadly, it often handles few materials of significance and addresses a tiny audience. Literary.
A short story is a narrative prose-piece that has a well defined beginning, middle, end and moves toward a climax. A short story is also meant to be read at one sitting, so the author must be concise and to the point. A play is a A short story provides a greater learning experience than a play because through a short story the writer's ideas are easier to interpret, the literary devices in a short story have a more important role in learning, and short stories have a stronger character development than a play. In a short story the writer's ideas are easier to interpret because the writer expresses all the characters feelings and actions, therefore the reader has little to interpret on his own. In a play some of the writer's ideas are left out and to be interpreted by the director and cast of the play, therefore when reading a play each person may have a different interpretation as well as maybe not fully understand the original meaning of the play. The literary devices in a short story have a more significant role than in a play and are often used more throughout a short story. Personification is an example where it is easier to give animals human features and understand them in a short story because the author is able to describe in detail the resemblance the animal has with people where in a play it is harder to describe and understand these similarities. Therefore this literary device is lost. There are a lot more complex sentences in short stories which give the reader an understanding of metaphors and similes as well as a larger vocabulary. In the short story, One Spring Night  by Morley Callaghan there are a large number of literary devices that give more detail and make the story more interesting to read Play writers do not have as much detail and literary devise in what they write so there is less to learn from them. Plays are made up of dialogue which often.