Editing Dialogue for Quotation Marks

Dialogue uses quotation marks. These special marks go before and after the exact words of the speaker.

Periods and commas that follow the speaker’s words always go inside the quotation marks.

Question marks and exclamation marks go inside the quotation marks when they punctuation the dialogue.

Revising to Add Sensory Details

To help your story come alive, you can add details about what you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. These are called sensory details.

Sensory details help you show readers what is happening, rather than just telling them. You can collect these details in a sensory chart.

Writing the Beginning Paragraph

The first sentence in your narrative should grab the reader’s attention. It is called a lead. The following strategies will help you write an effective lead.

1. Start in the middle of the action:

   I thought I was ready when I arrived at our school’s auditorium.

2. Start with dialogue:

   “Just wait a little longer,” said my grandpa.

3. Start with an interesting fact or statement:

   When Manny came to my school, I didn’t expect to become best friends.

Lead:

Introductory Details:

Prewriting to Focus Your Ideas

Reading Personal Narratives

Before you write about your own experience, you'll want to see how other students created personal narratives. This lesson shows you a narrative paragraph and a narrative essay, explaining each part. As you read them, think about how the writers made the people, places, and events come to life through description, action, and dialogue.

Reading a Narrative Paragraph

A personal narrative paragraph has three main parts. The topic sentence introduces your story. The body sentences describe what happened to you. The ending sentence tells why the experience was important. This paragraph shares one writer’s story about a school play.

Sample Paragraph

Warm-Up for Personal Narratives

All of us have important times in our lives. By thinking back to these times, we understand ourselves better. By sharing these times with those we love, we become closer. This lesson will help you think about events in your life.

What Is a Narrative?

(c) Thoughtful Learning 2015

A narrative is a story. It tells something that happened, like in a book or a movie. But books and movies are not the only places to find good stories. Your experiences make great stories, too.

A personal narrative is a true story about something that happened in your life. You might share an exciting, surprising, or scary experience, like the time you went camping and saw a bear. Or you might share a moment when you learned an important lesson.

The best personal narratives include many details, helping readers feel like they are a part of the story, too. In this unit, you will write a true story from your own life in way that makes it come alive once again!

Thinking About a True Story

Before you can share a story, you need to remember all the important things that happened. Asking and answering the 5 W’s questions can activate your memory and help you record important details about your experience.

• Who was with me?
• What exactly happened?
• Where did this happen?
• When did this happen?
• Why did it happen?

Prewriting for Problem-Solution Essays

Before you start writing your essay, you need to think about some problems in your community and ways you could help solve them. These prewriting activities will help you examine a problem, come up with a solution, and gather and organize details before you begin a first draft.

Prewriting to Explore Problems

Prewriting to Select a Topic

For your own opinion essay, you need to select a topic that is debatable and that you feel strongly about. A debatable topic is one that people have differing opinions about. There is no debate that young people need to exercise, but there is debate about extending the school year.

School Classes