Elements to consider in your focused narrative:
• Narration: Refer to yourself as “I” throughout the essay. You are doing a personal narrative about your thoughts and experiences in a community. Reflect on your thoughts about the topic, current practices in your communities, the current successes and failures of sustainability in your communities of engagement, and the challenges and possible solutions for how you and your community of engagement might contribute to the success of sustainability. Prewriting on these reflections will help you to define a topic.
• Resource Information: This essay should not include research information but instead should be based on your experiences and observations that are presented as stories and/or descriptions.
• Audience: Think about who would be interested in reading about your experiences. What can your audience learn from reading about your experiences and ideas? As you do some brainstorming and prewriting for the essay, consider what your potential audience may want to know about your ideas.
• Purpose: What is your purpose for writing about this? Do you want to inform your readers about environmental sustainability? Persuade them? Entertain them? Or do you simply wish to explore your feelings about this topic? As you do some brainstorming and prewriting for the essay, focus on what you really want to tell your audience and why, and determine (before drafting) what your purpose will be.
• Controlling Idea: Develop a strong, focused controlling idea about this topic that is clear to your readers. Show your readers how you feel! What is your opinion? Is there one particular aspect of sustainability you are sharing? Can individuals make a difference? How can individuals make a difference within such a diverse society? How can individuals persuade their communities of engagement to take responsibility for sustainability, or should they? Continue to ask yourself questions such as these, and then formulate an opinion statement that addresses this essay topic. The thesis (controlling idea) of an essay generally appears somewhere in your introduction for academic essays, but narratives and descriptions often have implied thesis statements, which an audience can understand by reading your narrative.
• Structure: Use multiple paragraphs to support your thesis, and provide concrete and specific examples that illuminate your supporting points, actions, and descriptions. Provide the audience with a reason to read past the first sentence – in other words, include an interesting introduction. Finally, no abrupt endings: provide readers with a conclusion that leaves them thinking about your essay long after they are done reading it.
• Format: Type and double-space your essay with one-inch margins and save as a rich text file. Include a title along with your name, the date, the course, and the assignment at the top of the first page.
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