Response to Narrative Writing

This week I really struggled to get the reading done for the blog post. I tried to take into account that last week we were advised to read the chapter first. While typically I enjoy Christensen's chapters, this week I just couldn't seem to focus. I also typically enjoy narrative writing, so I'm surprised I didn't enjoy the readings a bit more.

After reading the article The Politics of the Paragraph by Michelle Kenney, I ended up starting a conversation with one of my friends about writing. I very distinctly remember the thesis formula and how we were meant to come up with at least three ideas to dicsuss throughout our essay. However, as I got older I learned that you could have more than just three ideas. Similarly to Erica, I had to learn how to incorporate this into my thesis. Although I never faced nearly as much of a struggle as she did. While I always kept that 5 body formula in mind, and still do when I go to write, I don't strictly follow it.

I have always found a lot of the writing formulas my previous teachers gave me to be quite useful. There are really two formulas that I still think of today, one of which was a hamburger analogy and the other was a graphic organizer called R.A.C.E.S. R.A.C.E.S was very useful in getting my papers started. For those of you who never used this formula, the R stood for response to the prompt, the A stood for answer the question, the C was for citations, the E was to explain the citations and the S was a summary sentence. While these formulas don't particularly apply to narratives, they came to mind while I was reading the Kenney text.

When I was in high school I feel as though we didn't really cover narrative writing much after my freshmen year. While it took me awhile to get through Christensen's chapter, I do feel as though I learned quite a bit about narratives. I found that her dialogue strategy was insightful, as I have always typically shyed away from including dialogue in my works. I also learned about the "Read-Around Procedure", which I don't think I would ever implement in a class. While I was reading about it all I could think is how that would have been my absolute worst nightmare in High School, and would have most likely resulted in me skipping class or making myself sick in order to avoid that. Typically I find Christensen's strategies insightful and I think of how I can include them in my own future lessons, however the Read-Around Procedure is definitely one that I think I might avoid, as it puts shy students in a spotlight they might find to be horrifying rather than helpful.