General Guidelines For Writing A Narrative Analysis Essay


Narrative analysis essays are usually assigned to students to test their creative writing skills. You generally need to weave a story based on instances from your own life that relate to what is being taught in class. This assignment can be fun if you understand the proper approach. Thankfully, there are a couple of handy tips that can point you in the right direction and help you craft a high quality narrative analysis paper.

Finding the Right Topic

You should select a story that highlights a particular theme. Generally, these kinds of papers consist of two major components – the story along with the analysis part. The majority of the time, these types of assignments do not require you to conduct any external research. Rather you can use interesting personal anecdotes and instances from your life to serve as evidence about some specific point you are attempting to make.

Relevance is Important

It is important to ensure that your story is relevant in some way to the topic. It helps if you select a story that boasts of a manageable plot. You are not penning a novel and so your writing must be concise and clear. Do not make the paper too broad in terms of scope but include interesting details. Usually, these types of papers are non-fiction which means your work must be rooted in reality.

Creating a Good Draft

  • Create an outline for your narrative analysis paper prior to starting your work.
  • List the important plot points and ensure that your work has a clear start, middle and an ending.
  • Make sure that you do not waste time including irrelevant details. Venture straight into the meaty part of your story.
  • A formal outline is not important but you should be able to understand how to proceed with your work.
  • Your point of view needs to be consistent and you should not switch perspective midway.
  • Narrative analysis papers should also not be written in the past tense.

Revision of Your Work

Your work should have a clear theme and once you are done with the rough draft, edit it as many times as you want to smooth out all the kinks. Your purpose for picking the topic should be made clear. The theme of the story should be introduced right at the start of the paper. Your essay will require a topic statement for the purpose of describing the core content of the story.