Personal Narrative Essay: The Time My Cat

I wrote my personal narrative essay about the time my cat was stolen from me. Although I was effective in retelling the story itself, my paper had many mistakes. By revising these mistakes I fixed the grammatical and punctuation errors in my writing and also made the essay easier to understand and more meaningful. Throughout my essay there were several instances where I used the incorrect verb tense, or shifted back and forth between present and past tense. To fix this error I went back and made all my verbs in the past tense. This helped avoid any confusion about the timeline of the story and fixed that grammar mistake. I also had several comma splices throughout my essay. These sentences were very long and could be confusing to read. I went back through my essay and broke up the comma splices into two or more smaller sentences. Some of these sentences were less complex, but it allowed the reader to better understand what I was trying to convey. For example, I broke up the sentence “Who even though was sitting directly across from me I simply did not have time to show the image to because I was already typing my response, making sure to use plenty of punctuation and passive aggressive text abbreviations to fully express my anger.” into three …show more content…
At first I only had a few sentences that explained why I chose to write about my cat being stolen. This made it seem like the essay had no underlying meaning or lesson to be learned from it. To reverse this I added several sentences such as, “A middle schooler stealing my cat on Thanksgiving taught me a valuable lesson in empathy and understanding. Putting myself in the catnapper’s shoes showed me the flaws in my unwillingness to admit I was wrong.” to further show why this event was important to me. These details really tied my story together and revealed my purpose for writing about this