4 A Former First-year Comp Student Teaches Narrative (4/8) -- Who Teaches Writing?

4 A Former First-year Comp Student Teaches Narrative Dr. Charlotte Hogg Push play on the soundbar above to listen to the chapter. 16 min read AFormerFirstYearCompStudentTeachesNarrative._print What You Will Learn in this Chapter How is writing narrative more than “just” a story? If it’s a personal narrative, how is it more than being self-absorbed, or how can our own story reach other people? You’ll discover in this chapter ways to give your narrative significance or answer the “so what” question for readers: “why should I care?” You’ll learn about the importance of having a “claim of significance,” and how to come to that by finding what Donald Murray calls a “central tension” in a narrative. You’ll read about the importance of revision to best find and bring out the tension and significance. Finally, you’ll get some ideas for how to get words on the screen by being as particular as you can as well as how your openings and endings can help give your narrative more substance and meaning. Key Terms - Claim of Significance (“So what”) - Central tension - Allatonceness - Openings & Endings Why and How to Find the “So What?” in Your Narrative Sometimes we feel like we have nothing to say, and we might feel that even more when we’re given an assignment. When I took first-year composition my first semester of college, we wrote personal narratives the entire semester. I had lots to say—I was homesick, overwhelmed, but also thrilled about the social happenings coming at me. But I still sat stymied in front of the screen, not sure what would make a good story or what was interesting to readers. Brainstorming helped, but I still had to come up with initial ideas. I decided to write about things familiar to me from home, stories I’d told that had gotten good reactions from friends. I wrote about my parents’ car I borrowed in high school that could no longer go in reverse; I wrote about a terrible movie date where my date disappeared from the movie theater—I thought he’d ditched me—only to find out that when he got up to use the restroom during the movie, his leg had fallen asleep. He had to crawl up the aisle and was too embarrassed to come back in to the theater, dark as it was. I wrote about a bridge where my friends and I used to converge. These were readable, even engaging, according to my instructor, but she kindly pushed me in her feedback to clarify the point or purpose of my essays. To put it not-as-nicely: so what? Coming up with an idea may or may not be the hard part—sometimes it’s having an idea that readers can engage with and get into, that has a clear purpose, that’s the hardest part. Narrative can be deceptively simple—I’m just writing a story—but it still should have a purpose. Wendy Belcher calls this purpose a claim of significance, which is a piece’s “worthiness or value, emerging from its object of study, approach, argument, or solution.”[1] She’s talking here about drafting an academic article that typically has a clearer, more overt a