A personal narrative describes a memorable event of an author’s life. The author interprets the event based on his point of view. It reflects the author’s thoughts on the event and how he perceives it. So a personal narrative can be described as an account of the event and why it has an impact on the author’s life. The personal narrative essay aims to attract readers through powerful and convincing style of writing. For writing a strong personal narrative essay, it is important that you build up the rhythm of your writing in the lead paragraphs before making an impact in the main body.

Choose what you want to write in your personal narrative. It must be something that significantly affected you and changed your outlook towards life.

Create a topic sentence to base your writing on. Come up with something that your personal narrative can be centered around. That will serve as the topic sentence of your personal narrative.

Expand on the supporting sentences that develop your topic sentence. Think about the ideas you want to discuss in the body part. You are not supposed to reveal everything in the lead paragraphs that you will explore in the main body. Here you will only introduce the characters, setting and provide any significant background of the story.

Organise your sentences in such a way that they build towards the interpretation of the topic sentence. Write the supporting sentences logically, making smooth transitions into each other. This will guide readers to the gist of your story and will help them completely understand it.

Now, write the main body of your essay. Here you will discuss the main events of your personal narrative.

Having finished the first part of your essay, read through the initial paragraphs and check if they effectively leads up to the main body of writing as well as provide a solid foundation to start your discussion. Make sure if the supporting sentences are well aligned and the story smoothly leads to the main events of the narrative. However, if there are any broken or distorted parts, consider revising them. The initial writing of your personal narrative should only serve as an introduction of the whole story.

For effective composition of your sentences and paragraphs, you should create note cards with your topic sentence along with the supporting sentences and then shuffle them until they provide a clear and coherent interpretation of your topic.