Everybody loves a good story. For inexperienced nonfiction writers, telling a good story is tough work. In fact, the standard English class narrative essay is the hardest writing most students will ever do.

Fortunately, outside the classroom students will almost never need to write a personal narrative. They will have to write lots of third-person narratives, however.

Start with impersonal narrative

I recommend you concentrate on teaching third person narrative rather than first person narrative to your inexperienced writers. Not all academic and business writing has to be in third person, but a majority of it is.

Third-person narrative simply means the events are related as happening to someone other than the narrator.

Begin at the paragraph level

The easiest way to teach students to write narratives is to begin by calling for a third-person narrative paragraph as one of the pieces of supporting evidence within a traditional five-paragraph essay format. The restricted setting forces students to craft their narrative to make a point.

How do you call for a narrative paragraph? You build the requirement into your writing prompt.

Narrative is chronological, selective

Basic narrative relates events in chronological order, so the events are told in the same order in which they occurred. No one can tell everything about even a small event, so narration always involves selecting items to include and others to omit.

Writers have limited time and space, so they must chose the facets of an experience that are most significant. Writers have to narrate events in a way that

• Faithfully describes what happened, and

• Supports the point the writer is trying to illustrate with the narrative.

These two tasks present a formidable intellectual challenge, particularly if writers have to keep their narrative to no more than a single paragraph. That's why I recommend you hold off on requiring narration until after students are competent writers of the formula expository paragraph with its topic sentence and three pieces of evidence.

Common narrative paragraph topics

Writers often have to provide a short amount of third-person narration within an essay or other document with a non-narrative structure. Common examples of such narratives include

• Description of a historical event, such as a war.

• Description of a process, such an explanation of the method scientists used to conduct a piece of research.

• Plot summary of a literary work.

Such embedded summaries are a common requirement in academic and workplace writing.

If you would like help creating writing prompts that require students to include a narrative paragraph in their responses, consider taking one of my short, online professional development workshops.

Beyond 3rd person narrative

Learning to write third person narratives is a far more useful skill than learning to write personal narrative essays. However, that doesn't mean there is no place for first person nonfiction writing.

The ripple strategy I teach my students for thinking about potential evidence for their five-paragraph essays starts by having them examine their personal experience for items that are relevant.

Taking my cue from the APA Publications Manual, I tell students to present their personal experience in first person.

You and I and other writing teachers must avoid giving students the impression that their personal experience is sufficient evidence for any point they wish to prove. Personal experience must be one of several types of evidence students examine as they analyze their writing topics.