Constraints: A Personal Narrative Prompts

One day, my senior year in high school, we were handed three different narratives prompts. The rules were simple pick one of the prompts and write about it. Easy right? At the time, the prompt that stood out to me the most was, “think of a time when you taught someone something important.” I pondered the topic for sometime and what finally popped into my head was a great experience when I was in the seventh grade. In one of my classes there was an autistic kid, and I had the fulfilling privilege of teaching him how to do basic math. That was a wonderful experience, and contained an uplifting story, that I was excited to write about and share. A year later I went back through this piece and began analyzing it, I notice a few things that I have …show more content…
One of the most obvious constraints that affected the quality of my paper was the mere fact that the story was written a whole five years after teaching the autistic kid. As a result of the time difference, small details were forgotten, which resulted in a lacking story. During the experience itself, I was filled with emotion, yet with so many years between the event and the time the story was actually written down, the exact emotions I felt at the time of the event had been slowly erased away. Strongly written papers tend to have emotion laced throughout them. Though my paper wouldn’t be as grammatically strong as writing in twelfth grade, if I would have written down the experience right after it happened, I know there would have been smaller significant details and emotions that I just couldn’t remember in the years that had come to pass. Another constraint that needs to be factored in was the time allowed to write the paper. There simply was not enough time to really immerse myself and process the story in the depth that would have made it much better paper. More time would have allowed me to think about the moment when this experience happened to me. Another factor that played in was I knew that not only was my teacher going to read my paper, but my peers are also going to be reading it. Having peers read and analyze my …show more content…
The way the narrative was written did not do the story justice, it actually did quite the opposite. It made it sound dry, boring, and took a story that was very near and dear, one that the world should hear, and made it fall flat. There was a consistent lack of emotion and detail that made the story feel too emotionless and devoid of human feelings. The story was also written for the wrong purpose which hurt the narrative even more. I also allowed the unheard opinions of the audience sway my storyline, and it hopes of guarding my true emotions, led me to leaving out important details. I choose the prompt and story because it was something close to my heart, and now I know that I should not have let my worry and fear get in the way of writing a great