Descriptive Vs Narrative Writing Writing Styles Exposition Explaining

Descriptive Vs Narrative Writing

Writing Styles Exposition: Explaining an idea or concept. Argument: Proving a point. Narrative: Telling a story. Description: Presenting what is apparent to your senses (describing).

Description • Description uses sensory detail (sights, sounds, tactile sensations, tastes and smells) to describe a scene, person or feeling to a reader. • As you describe, you create a three-dimensional picture so your reader can experience the item, place, person or emotion along with the reading. • Descriptive essay topics include your favorite place, your bedroom, your best friend, the most unusual object you own, an art exhibit, the best or worst teacher you ever had, your ideal job or dream home. Narration • A narrative often reflects your personal experience, explaining what happened during some sort of experience. • Stories are narrative, and narrative essays have a similar purpose of telling the events to a reader. • Narrative essay topics include recounting an experience where you learned something significant, your first day at school, your first job interview, a frightening encounter, an experience that changed your life and two differing versions of the same event. • Narration is not always a personal experience.

Similarities • Both narrative and descriptive essays should follow essay format with an introductory paragraph, body paragraphs and a concluding paragraph. • At the end of the introduction, place a thesis, a sentence that explains the overall purpose of your paper. • You should give a reason for your narration or description in that thesis, explaining why this event, person, place or thing is important enough for you to write about. • The thesis might express that you are telling a story because you learned something significant or that you are describing a place that creates a sense of calm in your life. • In both narration and description, include specific details in the body paragraphs to support the idea set forth in your thesis.

Introduction Descriptive Writing Narrative Writing • Descriptive paper introductions touch directly on what the subject to be discussed in the whole paper. • The reader can definitely guess what to expect from treading the rest of the paper. • Narrative essays are built on suspense and as such don’t really reveal what to expect in the paper. • The reader has to go down further to grasp an idea of what the paper is about.

Point of View Descriptive Narrative • Descriptive ones are written in the third person as they involve the writer describing another person, place or object. • However, in some cases it can take the first person. • This is of course when the paper is about describing yourself. • Narrative ones are written in the first person using words like "I" and "me, " • This is obviously because they involve the narration of a personal experience from the writer and as such the writer is inside the story.

Paragraph structure Descriptive • Descriptive papers have relatively longer paragraphs with each containing a unique description of the character. Narrative • Narratives can have two one sentence paragraphs. • There is also more use of dialogue in narrative papers than descriptive papers.

Conclusion Descriptive Narrative • Descriptive essay conclusions are quite long and most of the time echo the impact of the described person to the writer. • The concluding part in a narrative can be as short as a sentence and mainly mentions a lesson learnt

Overall structure and technique Descriptive Narrative • Descriptive essays are presented in a chronological manner so that there is a consistent sensible flow of events. • The writer can employ the use of time features such as foreshadow and flashbacks regularly in the writing. • Narrative involves a sequence of events. • The writer proceeds in a chronological order