Narrative Workshop Blog Post (3)

The top 3 insights I got from the last day of workshops were about the title, reflection and organization. Both the narratives we analyzed didn't have great titles, one didn't even have a title at all. Through the discussion, we realized how important having a good title was, because it would set up a little bit of context for the reader, it also shouldn't give the entire thing away. Next, while analyzing the narratives, we found that often the reflection was too blunt. Andrew, who did the animal encounter narrative, had to have a lot of reflection at the end based on the mentor text. However, quite a bit of it was too blunt, and this is a lot like my reflection too. I need to make my reflection fit with my narrative in a more subtle way, and have the reader infer some of it rather than downright telling them what I learned. Lastly, organization. In some narrative we read, the beginning wasn't really connected to the middle (crux) of the story, or the focus wasn't really on the middle of the story. This confuses the reader sometimes because it's hard to identify what part is the important piece in the story, therefore it's important to have some exposition and development, but authors have to connect it to the middle/end of the story. In addition, the ending usually doesn't fit with the rest of the story, because it includes abstract reflection, or the events don't connect well. It's important to organize your narrative so that the reader can follow along, as well as make the whole thing flow together. One thing I can improve on for discussions are asking more questions because that's what the author needs to hear. They need to hear what the reader is having trouble understanding, therefore they can go and fix it in the narrative. 

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