Writing Exercise Ten

(Style and Structure)

Write your best story. Making use of any or all of the techniques you have learned to date, write your story so that it best expresses the real journey you have made, leaving your home and coming to college. Remember to remember the essay structure. Your story will have an Introduction that attempts to get the reader interested in the rest of the story. Your story will have a Body to it: the body of the story is where all the details are revealed. And your story will have a Conclusion that does what conclusions are meant to do: it will unify your story and will leave the reader an image that will linger in the reader's mind, an image that can be used to recall your story to mind.

Essentially, your story is a record of a journey. What is the real journey? You'll have to answer that through the writing of it. Just try to keep in mind that the word journey" has many meanings, and you have been discovering some of them as you write your way through the journey that is both physical and mental—spiritual, mythical, emotional.

ALSO: This is the last time in your life that you will write one of these exercises. "What a relief!" you might say. No matter how you look at all the effort you had put into these exercises, with this one it comes to an end. Why not go out in style? This is the last opportunity you have to perfect this story, that even though it is shared by all of us is your story and yours alone.

Meta-Narrative Ten: There is no longer a need to write a story about your story. By now you have mastered the skills of using quoted material to make a the point you want to make about the sentence style changes in your stories. This skill is something you will continue to utilize throughout your career as a writer. You will write analytical papers, explanation papers, research papers; all of these papers will demand the skill you have mastered already.

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Go to Teale's Metaphors

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