Prewriting for Personal Narratives
Prewriting is your first step in writing a personal narrative. These prewriting activities will help you select a topic to write about, gather important details about the topic, and organize your thoughts before you begin a first draft.
Prewriting to Focus Your Ideas
Choose your topic.
Your goal is to write a personal narrative about an unforgettable experience. Complete the following sentence starters to help you discover a writing idea. Then circle the topic you wish to write about.
- I’ll never forget the time when . . .
- I learned an important lesson when . . .
- I was proud of myself when . . .
Gather the basic parts.
Fill in a 5 W’s memory chart to gather all of the basic details about the experience.
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Who? |
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What? |
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Where? |
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When? |
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Why? |
Prewriting to Organize Details
All narratives need actions. Actions are the things that happen in the story. Usually, the actions are organized in time order, or when they happened.
Place actions in time order.
List the things that happened in your experience, from start to finish. Use a time line to organize them in time order.
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1 |
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2 |
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3 |
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4 |
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5 |
Teaching Tip
Let your students know that their time lines can have more or fewer than five actions.
Add dialogue and thought details.
Make your experience come alive for readers by adding dialogue and thought details. Dialogue is what the people said during your experience. Thought details are how you felt or what you were thinking while the experience was happening. Study each sample and write an example from your own experience.
- Dialogue: “Goodness. Look at the size of that fish,” Grandpa said.
- Thought detail: I couldn’t believe I forgot my line. I felt embarrassed.
Teaching Tip
Help students understand that they don’t need to remember exactly what was said. Their goal is to make dialogue sound natural—something the person could have said.