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• How to write a narrative essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A narrative essay tells a story. In most cases, this is a story about a personal experience you had. This type of essay , along with the descriptive essay , allows you to get personal and creative, unlike most academic writing .

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Table of contents

What is a narrative essay for, choosing a topic, interactive example of a narrative essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about narrative essays.

When assigned a narrative essay, you might find yourself wondering: Why does my teacher want to hear this story? Topics for narrative essays can range from the important to the trivial. Usually the point is not so much the story itself, but the way you tell it.

A narrative essay is a way of testing your ability to tell a story in a clear and interesting way. You’re expected to think about where your story begins and ends, and how to convey it with eye-catching language and a satisfying pace.

These skills are quite different from those needed for formal academic writing. For instance, in a narrative essay the use of the first person (“I”) is encouraged, as is the use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense.

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Narrative essay assignments vary widely in the amount of direction you’re given about your topic. You may be assigned quite a specific topic or choice of topics to work with.

• Write a story about your first day of school.
• Write a story about your favorite holiday destination.

You may also be given prompts that leave you a much wider choice of topic.

• Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
• Write about an achievement you are proud of. What did you accomplish, and how?

In these cases, you might have to think harder to decide what story you want to tell. The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to talk about a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

For example, a trip where everything went according to plan makes for a less interesting story than one where something unexpected happened that you then had to respond to. Choose an experience that might surprise the reader or teach them something.

Narrative essays in college applications

When applying for college , you might be asked to write a narrative essay that expresses something about your personal qualities.

For example, this application prompt from Common App requires you to respond with a narrative essay.

In this context, choose a story that is not only interesting but also expresses the qualities the prompt is looking for—here, resilience and the ability to learn from failure—and frame the story in a way that emphasizes these qualities.

An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

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If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?

The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.

Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.

When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

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Writing Narratives About Science: Advice From People Who Do it Well

Starting to catch up after, yup, another set of trips — but with really interesting stuff to talk about very shortly. To start: I spent part of this past week at the biannual World Conference of Science Journalists, which was in Helsinki this time. (Yes, way up north. Yes, midnight sun, almost — disorienting and gorgeous). While I was there I joined the excellent journalists Ed Yong Of Not Exactly Rocket Science, Helen Pearson of Nature, and Alok Jha of the Guardian and the BBC to talk about the craft of writing long narrative features about science. Among ourselves we talked about wanting to avoid being “lost in the Features Dark Place” — which is to say, being overwhelmed by your material to the point where you don’t know where to start.

It was a very interactive session; we estimate we had about 200 people crammed into a tiny room, and they all had things to say (to the point that they refused to leave when the session time was up, and camped out for an additional 45 minutes). I tried to livetweet — which was a little challenging, being one of the presenters — and the results are below. Since I couldn’t capture my own points while talking (pre-schedule tweets next time?), I’ll just mention my key lessons:

To me the most important tool for telling narrative is time. Not just time within the narrative, which is what allows you to tell the story as a chronology, but time for research and reporting before you begin writing. Really good narratives are grounded in memorable characters confronting difficult problems, and it takes a lot of research time up-front to identify them.

To the degree that you allow yourself enough research time, do the same in allowing yourself reporting time. It’s only when you spend adequate time with people, in their own homes, labs or farms, that you start to understand what moves them to do what they do. You can only capture the scenes, dialogue and descriptions that drive excellent narratives if you’re present for them — and they offer themselves up on their schedule, not yours.

One other thing: The “pushing the piano” reference down below probably needs some explanation. As an undergraduate I had a fantastic acting teacher, Paul McCarren, who focused his classes on rehearsal technique, which is to say, extracting the most out of a scene while you are exploring it in rehearsal with other actors, so you can deliver what you have found during performance. He was famous for saying, “When you don’t know what to do” — when you aren’t connecting with the other actor, you can’t find the emotional through-line of a piece, you don’t know what you’re doing here — “shove the piano across the room.” He meant it literally: There was a grand piano in our rehearsal space, and if actors were stuck on a scene, he would have us recite the scene while pushing. It almost always unblocked us. And it’s a great lesson on how getting away from your desk and doing something physical can unlock the stuck places in your brain.

Now, the session:

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Chemistry - Free Essay Examples and Topic Ideas

Chemistry is a natural science that deals with the composition and behavior of matter. It focuses on the study of atoms, molecules, and their interactions with one another. Chemistry is an essential field of science that advances our understanding of the world around us and enables us to develop new materials, medicines, and technologies. From the smallest subatomic particles to the largest chemical reactions, chemistry helps us comprehend, predict, and manipulate the properties and transformations of matter.

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Narrative Essays

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What is a narrative essay?

When writing a narrative essay, one might think of it as telling a story. These essays are often anecdotal, experiential, and personal—allowing students to express themselves in a creative and, quite often, moving ways.

Here are some guidelines for writing a narrative essay.

• If written as a story, the essay should include all the parts of a story.

This means that you must include an introduction, plot, characters, setting, climax, and conclusion.

• When would a narrative essay not be written as a story?

A good example of this is when an instructor asks a student to write a book report. Obviously, this would not necessarily follow the pattern of a story and would focus on providing an informative narrative for the reader.

• The essay should have a purpose.

Make a point! Think of this as the thesis of your story. If there is no point to what you are narrating, why narrate it at all?

• The essay should be written from a clear point of view.

It is quite common for narrative essays to be written from the standpoint of the author; however, this is not the sole perspective to be considered. Creativity in narrative essays oftentimes manifests itself in the form of authorial perspective.

• Use clear and concise language throughout the essay.

Much like the descriptive essay, narrative essays are effective when the language is carefully, particularly, and artfully chosen. Use specific language to evoke specific emotions and senses in the reader.

• The use of the first person pronoun ‘I’ is welcomed.

Do not abuse this guideline! Though it is welcomed it is not necessary—nor should it be overused for lack of clearer diction.

• As always, be organized!

Have a clear introduction that sets the tone for the remainder of the essay. Do not leave the reader guessing about the purpose of your narrative. Remember, you are in control of the essay, so guide it where you desire (just make sure your audience can follow your lead).

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What is a Narrative Essay? How to Write It (with Examples)

Narrative essays are a type of storytelling in which writers weave a personal experience into words to create a fascinating and engaging narrative for readers. A narrative essay explains a story from the author’s point of view to share a lesson or memory with the reader. Narrative essays, like descriptive essays , employ figurative language to depict the subject in a vivid and creative manner to leave a lasting impact on the readers’ minds. In this article, we explore the definition of narrative essays, list the key elements to be included, and provide tips on how to craft a narrative that captivates your audience.

Table of Contents

What is a narrative essay, choosing narrative essay topics, key elements in a narrative essay, creating a narrative essay outline, types of narrative essays, the pre-writing stage, the writing stage, the editing stage, narrative essay example, frequently asked questions.

Narrative essays are often based on one’s personal experience which allows the author to express himself/herself in compelling ways for the reader. They employ storytelling elements to convey the plot and captivate the reader while disclosing the story’s theme or purpose. The author must always have a purpose or theme in mind when writing a narrative essay. These essays may be assigned to high school students to assess their ability to create captivating stories based on personal experiences, or they may be required as part of a college application to assess the applicant’s personal traits. Narrative essays might be based on true events with minor tweaks for dramatic purposes, or they can be adapted from a fictional scenario. Whatever the case maybe, the goal is to tell a story, a good story!

In narrative essays, the emphasis is not so much on the narrative itself as it is on how you explain it. Narrative essay topics cover a range of experiences, from noteworthy to mundane, but when storytelling elements are used well, even a simple account can have weight. Notably, the skills required for narrative writing differ significantly from those needed for formal academic essays, and we will delve deeper into this in the next section.

You can talk about any narrative, but consider whether it is fascinating enough, has enough twists and turns, or teaches a lesson (It’s a plus if the story contains an unexpected twist at the end). The potential topics for a narrative essay are limitless—a triumphant story, a brief moment of introspection, or a voyage of self-discovery. These essays provide writers with the opportunity to share a fragment of their lives with the audience, enriching both the writer’s and the reader’s experiences. Narrative essay examples could be a write-up on “What has been your biggest achievement in life so far and what did it teach you?” or “Describe your toughest experience and how you dealt with it?”.

While narrative essays allow you to be creative with your ideas, language, and format, they must include some key components to convey the story clearly, create engaging content and build reader interest. Follow these guidelines when drafting your essay:   

• Tell your story using the first person to engage users.
• Use sufficient sensory information and figurative language.
• Follow an organized framework so the story flows chronologically.
• Include interesting plot components that add to the narrative.
• Ensure clear language without grammar, spelling, or word choice errors.

Narrative essay outlines serve as the foundational structure for essay composition, acting as a framework to organize thoughts and ideas prior to the writing process. These outlines provide writers with a means to summarize the story, and help in formulating the introduction and conclusion sections and defining the narrative’s trajectory.

Unlike conventional essays that strictly adhere to the five-paragraph structure, narrative essays allow for more flexibility as the organization is dictated by the flow of the story. The outline typically encompasses general details about the events, granting writers the option to prioritize writing the body sections first while deferring the introduction until later stages of the writing process. This approach allows for a more organic and fluid writing process. If you’re wondering how to start writing a narrative essay outline, here is a sample designed to ensure a compelling and coherent narrative:

Introduction

• Hook/Opening line: The introduction should have an opening/hook sentence that is a captivating quote, question, or anecdote that grabs the reader’s attention.
• Background: Briefly introduce the setting, time, tone, and main characters.
• Thesis statement: State clearly the main theme or lesson acquired from the experience.
• Event 1 (according to occurrence): Describe the first major event in detail. Introduce the primary characters and set the story context; include sensory elements to enrich the narrative and give the characters depth and enthusiasm.
• Event 2: Ensure a smooth transition from one event to the next. Continue with the second event in the narrative. For more oomph, use suspense or excitement, or leave the plot with cliffhanger endings. Concentrate on developing your characters and their relationships, using dialog to bring the story to life.
• Event 3: If there was a twist and suspense, this episode should introduce the climax or resolve the story. Keep the narrative flowing by connecting events logically and conveying the feelings and reactions of the characters.
• Summarize the plot: Provide a concise recap of the main events within the narrative essay. Highlight the key moments that contribute to the development of the storyline. Offer personal reflections on the significance of the experiences shared, emphasizing the lasting impact they had on the narrator. End the story with a clincher; a powerful and thought-provoking sentence that encapsulates the essence of the narrative. As a bonus, aim to leave the reader with a memorable statement or quote that enhances the overall impact of the narrative. This should linger in the reader’s mind, providing a satisfying and resonant conclusion to the essay.

There are several types of narrative essays, each with their own unique traits. Some narrative essay examples are presented in the table below.

How to write a narrative essay: Step-by-step guide

A narrative essay might be inspired by personal experiences, stories, or even imaginary scenarios that resonate with readers, immersing them in the imaginative world you have created with your words. Here’s an easy step-by-step guide on how to write a narrative essay.

• Select the topic of your narrative

If no prompt is provided, the first step is to choose a topic to write about. Think about personal experiences that could be given an interesting twist. Readers are more likely to like a tale if it contains aspects of humor, surprising twists, and an out-of-the-box climax. Try to plan out such subjects and consider whether you have enough information on the topic and whether it meets the criteria of being funny/inspiring, with nice characters/plot lines, and an exciting climax. Also consider the tone as well as any stylistic features (such as metaphors or foreshadowing) to be used. While these stylistic choices can be changed later, sketching these ideas early on helps you give your essay a direction to start.

• Create a framework for your essay

Once you have decided on your topic, create an outline for your narrative essay. An outline is a framework that guides your ideas while you write your narrative essay to keep you on track. It can help with smooth transitions between sections when you are stuck and don’t know how to continue the story. It provides you with an anchor to attach and return to, reminding you of why you started in the first place and why the story matters.

• Compile your first draft

A perfect story and outline do not work until you start writing the draft and breathe life into it with your words. Use your newly constructed outline to sketch out distinct sections of your narrative essay while applying numerous linguistic methods at your disposal. Unlike academic essays, narrative essays allow artistic freedom and leeway for originality so don’t stop yourself from expressing your thoughts. However, take care not to overuse linguistic devices, it’s best to maintain a healthy balance to ensure readability and flow.

• Use a first-person point of view

One of the most appealing aspects of narrative essays is that traditional academic writing rules do not apply, and the narration is usually done in the first person. You can use first person pronouns such as I and me while narrating different scenarios. Be wary of overly using these as they can suggest lack of proper diction.

• Use storytelling or creative language

You can employ storytelling tactics and linguistic tools used in fiction or creative writing, such as metaphors, similes, and foreshadowing, to communicate various themes. The use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense is encouraged in narrative essays.

• Follow a format to stay organized

There’s no fixed format for narrative essays, but following a loose format when writing helps in organizing one’s thoughts. For example, in the introduction part, underline the importance of creating a narrative essay, and then reaffirm it in the concluding paragraph. Organize your story chronologically so that the reader can follow along and make sense of the story.

• Reread, revise, and edit

Proofreading and editing are critical components of creating a narrative essay, but it can be easy to become weighed down by the details at this stage. Taking a break from your manuscript before diving into the editing process is a wise practice. Stepping away for a day or two, or even just a few hours, provides valuable time to enhance the plot and address any grammatical issues that may need correction. This period of distance allows for a fresh perspective, enabling you to approach the editing phase with renewed clarity and a more discerning eye.

One suggestion is to reconsider the goals you set out to cover when you started the topic. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is there a distinct beginning and end to your story?
• Does your essay have a topic, a memory, or a lesson to teach?
• Does the tone of the essay match the intended mood?

Now, while keeping these things in mind, modify and proofread your essay. You can use online grammar checkers and paraphrase tools such as Paperpal to smooth out any rough spots before submitting it for publication or submission.

It is recommended to edit your essay in the order it was written; here are some useful tips:

• Revise the introduction

After crafting your narrative essay, review the introduction to ensure it harmonizes with the developed narrative. Confirm that it adeptly introduces the story and aligns seamlessly with the conclusion.

• Revise the conclusion and polish the essay

The conclusion should be the final element edited to ensure coherence and harmony in the entire narrative. It must reinforce the central theme or lesson outlined initially.

• Revise and refine the entire article

The last step involves refining the article for consistent tone, style, and tense as well as correct language, grammar, punctuation, and clarity. Seeking feedback from a mentor or colleague can offer an invaluable external perspective at this stage.

Narrative essays are true accounts of the writer’s personal experiences, conveyed in figurative language for sensory appeal. Some narrative essay topic examples include writing about an unforgettable experience, reflecting on mistakes, or achieving a goal. An example of a personal narrative essay is as follows:

Title: A Feline Odyssey: An Experience of Fostering Stray Kittens

Introduction:

It was a fine summer evening in the year 2022 when a soft meowing disrupted the tranquility of my terrace. Little did I know that this innocent symphony would lead to a heartwarming journey of compassion and companionship. Soon, there was a mama cat at my doorstep with four little kittens tucked behind her. They were the most unexpected visitors I had ever had.

The kittens, just fluffs of fur with barely open eyes, were a monument to life’s fragility. Their mother, a street-smart feline, had entrusted me with the care of her precious offspring. The responsibility was sudden and unexpected, yet there was an undeniable sense of purpose in the air , filling me with delight and enthusiasm.

As the days unfolded, my terrace transformed into a haven for the feline family. Cardboard boxes became makeshift cat shelters and my once solitary retreat was filled with purrs and soothing meows. The mother cat, Lily, who initially observ ed me from a safe distance, gradually began to trust my presence as I offered food and gentle strokes.

Fostering the kittens was a life-changing , enriching experience that taught me the true joy of giving as I cared for the felines. My problems slowly faded into the background as evenings were spent playing with the kittens. Sleepless nights turned into a symphony of contented purring, a lullaby filled with the warmth of trust and security . Although the kittens were identical, they grew up to have very distinct personalities, with Kuttu being the most curious and Bobo being the most coy . Every dawn ushered in a soothing ritual of nourishing these feline companions, while nights welcomed their playful antics — a daily nocturnal delight.

Conclusion:

As the kittens grew, so did the realization that our paths were destined to part. Finally, the day arrived when the feline family, now confident and self-reliant, bid farewell to my terrace. It was a bittersweet moment, filled with a sense of love and accomplishment and a tinge of sadness.

Fostering Kuttu, Coco, Lulu, and Bobo became one of the most transformative experiences of my life. Their arrival had brought unexpected joy, teaching me about compassion and our species’ ability to make a difference in the world through love and understanding. The terrace, once a quiet retreat, now bore the echoes of a feline symphony that had touched my heart in ways I could have never imagined.

The length of a narrative essay may vary, but it is typically a brief to moderate length piece. Generally, the essay contains an introductory paragraph, two to three body paragraphs (this number can vary), and a conclusion. The entire narrative essay could be as short as five paragraphs or much longer, depending on the assignment’s requirements or the writer’s preference.

You can write a narrative essay when you have a personal experience to share, or a story, or a series of events that you can tell in a creative and engaging way. Narrative essays are often assigned in academic settings as a form of writing that allows students to express themselves and showcase their storytelling skills. However, you can also write a narrative essay for personal reflection, entertainment, or to communicate a message.

A narrative essay usually follows a three-part structure: – Introduction (To set the stage for the story) – Body paragraphs (To describe sequence of events with details, descriptions, and dialogue) – Conclusion (To summarize the story and reflect on the significance)

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What is a Descriptive Essay? How to Write It (with Examples)

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A Narrative Assignment in Chemistry

Professor cathy middlecamp, integrated liberal studies 251.

Project #2 – Radioactivity and People

ILS 251 has several higher order learning goals . One is that you are able to take what you learn in one context and apply it to another. This project offers you the opportunity. We hope you will enjoy it. To quote a former student, the project was “one of my favorites to work on in my college career!”

GRADING: Please check the grading criteria and due dates for all parts of this project.

OVERVIEW: This semester, you have encountered two stories in which people and radioactive substances were intimately connected. The first was the Radium Girls; the second the Firecracker Boys. Your task is to find a third story—anywhere on the planet—that involves people and radioactivity.

VIEW FROM A STUDENT: Lindsay wrote this essay for future students taking ILS 251. Her project was closely connected with art, one of her interests. Her research connected her to the sculpture of Tony Price, an atomic artist and peace activist. To quote Lindsay, “I found Tony Price and immediately knew he was my guy.”

EXAMPLES: Please examine these topics from previous years. Each concerns both people and radioactive substances. The people are citizens in a city or town, an indigenous group, those living at a particular location, or perhaps those carrying out a common job or mission. The radioactivity may involve contamination of the land, leukemia or lung cancer, the disposal of nuclear waste, testing of atomic weapons, nuclear accidents, the medical experimentation with radioisotopes, or perhaps just having a radioisotope in the wrong place at the wrong time.

• Storing Nuclear Waste on Tribal Lands – Yucca Mountain
• Depleted Uranium (DU) in Iraq – A Weapon of Mass Destruction
• The H-Bomb and the Marshallese People
• Plutonium and the Workers at Kerr McGee Corporation
• The Palomares Incident in Spain
• The Secret Disaster at Mayak

YOUR TOPIC: You each need your own area of inquiry. Accordingly, you must confirm your topic with your instructor before you begin your research. If you wish to work on a particular topic, claim it early. Once your instructor has all of the topics, she will group them according to a master plan (optimistically she can find one). You will know the date of your presentation before spring break.

YOUR PAPER: Mid-semester, you will submit a polished 5-page paper. Your paper must present the reader with a thesis; that is, a point of view that you introduce and later revisit in your conclusion. The first version should be your best work (NOT a “draft”) because several of us are going to invest significant time & energy in reviewing what you wrote. Please use this format:

• Software Microsoft Word
• Format Double-spaced, 1 inch margins, 12-point font, page numbers at bottom center
• Page 1 Title, your name, date, & name of your Writing Fellow
• Page 2-6 Body of your paper
• Page 7+ Any figures, tables, photographs
• Final page References. Follow this Style Guide

Your Writing Fellow will provide written feedback on your paper and meet with you to discuss specifics. Look to your Writing fellow for (1) help in developing and conveying your thesis, and (2) tips for writing with clarity and style. Your instructor will offer feedback on (1) your content, helping to troubleshoot any glitches, and (2) your references, making sure that you are citing correctly. Use this dual feedback to revise your paper. You will submit a second version at the end of the semester.

THE CLASS PRESENTATION: During April and May, we will dedicate class time to student presentations. These will be scheduled during the period, each for 50 minutes. As part of your presentation, please provide your peers with (1) an assignment to prepare for the class, and (2) a handout of your own design. In turn, your peers will provide you with an assessment.

Narrative Essay

Ai generator.

A narrative essay is a form of storytelling where the writer shares a personal experience in a detailed and engaging manner. Crafting a Short Narrative Essay allows the author to focus on a specific event or moment, making it concise and impactful. Writing a Beneficial Narrative Essay helps readers connect with the author’s journey, providing insight and reflection. The Thesis Statement for Narrative Essay serves as the guiding idea, encapsulating the main point or lesson learned. A well-crafted Narrative Summary ensures the story is coherent and compelling, leaving a lasting impression on the audience.

What is Narrative Essay?

A narrative essay is a form of writing that tells a story from the writer’s personal experience, using vivid details and a clear sequence of events. It aims to engage readers by making them feel a part of the journey, often imparting a meaningful lesson or insight.

Examples of Narrative Essay

• A Memorable Family Vacation – Recount a family trip that left a lasting impression.
• My First Day at School – Describe the emotions and experiences of your first school day.
• An Unexpected Adventure – Share a surprising and exciting experience you had.
• Overcoming a Fear – Narrate the story of how you faced and conquered a fear.
• A Life-Changing Event – Detail an event that significantly impacted your life.
• A Lesson Learned the Hard Way – Explain a situation where you learned an important lesson through a challenging experience.
• My Favorite Childhood Memory – Describe a cherished memory from your childhood.
• A Time I Helped Someone – Share a story where you helped someone in need and what you learned from it.
• A Day I Will Never Forget – Narrate a day that stands out vividly in your memory.
• My First Job Experience – Recount your experiences and lessons learned from your first job.
• The Best Decision I Ever Made – Explain a decision that positively changed your life.
• A Time I Stood Up for Myself – Describe an instance where you confidently defended your beliefs or actions.
• A Significant Challenge I Faced – Narrate how you dealt with a major challenge in your life.
• My Favorite Holiday Celebration – Share your experiences and traditions during a special holiday.
• A Friendship That Changed Me – Describe a friendship that had a profound impact on you.
• A Moment of Personal Growth – Explain a situation where you experienced significant personal development.
• A Funny Incident from My Life – Recount a humorous event that still makes you laugh.
• A Time I Felt Truly Happy – Describe an experience that brought you immense joy and fulfillment.
• My Experience Moving to a New Place – Share your feelings and experiences about relocating to a new environment.
• A Mistake That Taught Me a Valuable Lesson – Narrate a mistake you made and the lessons you learned from it.

Narrative Essay Examples for Students

• My First Day at High School : My first day at high school was a mix of excitement and nervousness. Walking through the crowded halls, I felt lost but eager to start a new chapter.
• Overcoming Stage Fright : In eighth grade, I was chosen to lead the school play. Though terrified, I practiced tirelessly and eventually overcame my stage fright.
• A Memorable Family Vacation : Last summer, my family and I went on a trip to the Grand Canyon. The breathtaking views and the bonding moments we shared made it an unforgettable experience.
• The Day I Got My First Pet : Getting my first pet, a golden retriever named Max, was a day filled with joy. I vividly remember the feeling of holding him for the first time and the instant bond we formed.
• Learning to Ride a Bike : Learning to ride a bike was a significant milestone in my childhood. My dad spent countless hours running beside me, encouraging me not to give up.

Narrative Essay Topics

• A Life-Changing Experience
• My First Day at a New School
• An Unforgettable Family Reunion
• The Day I Overcame a Fear
• A Time I Got Lost
• The Best Birthday Party Ever
• A Lesson Learned from a Mistake
• The Moment I Realized I Was Growing Up
• A Memorable Road Trip
• An Unexpected Act of Kindness
• A Funny Incident in My Life
• A Time I Stood Up for Myself
• A Significant Challenge I Faced
• My First Job Experience
• A Time When I Felt Truly Happy
• A Difficult Decision I Had to Make
• The Day I Met My Best Friend
• An Adventure in Nature
• A Family Tradition That Means a Lot to Me
• The First Time I Tried Something New

Narrative Essay Format

Introduction.

From a young age, I was terrified of public speaking. The very thought of standing in front of an audience made my palms sweat and my heart race. However, my journey to overcome this fear taught me valuable lessons about courage and perseverance.

In eighth grade, I was unexpectedly chosen to play the lead role in our school play. At first, I wanted to decline the offer, but my teacher encouraged me to step out of my comfort zone. With her support and my parents’ encouragement, I reluctantly agreed.

As the day of the performance approached, my nerves intensified. However, I remembered my teacher’s advice: “Focus on the story you’re telling, not on the audience.” On the night of the play, I took a deep breath and stepped onto the stage, my heart pounding in my chest.

To my surprise, as I delivered my first lines, the fear began to fade. I became immersed in my character, and the audience’s presence seemed to disappear. By the end of the play, I felt a sense of accomplishment and pride that I had never experienced before.

Overcoming my stage fright was a pivotal moment in my life. It taught me that facing my fears head-on and persevering through challenges can lead to personal growth and unexpected rewards.

How to write Narrative Essay

Choose a Topic : Pick a story or experience from your life that you can describe in detail and that has a clear point or lesson.

Create an Outline : Outline the main events of your story in the order they happened. This will help you organize your thoughts and ensure your essay flows smoothly.

Write the Introduction:

• Hook : Start with an interesting opening sentence to grab the reader’s attention.
• Setting the Scene : Provide background information about where and when the story takes place.
• Thesis Statement : Briefly explain the main point or lesson of your story.

Write the Body Paragraphs :

• Paragraph 1: Beginning of the Story
• Paragraph 2: Rising Action
• Paragraph 3: Climax
• Paragraph 4: Falling Action
• Write the Conclusion : Summarize the lesson or main point of your story.

Tips for Narrative Essay Writing

• Start with a Strong Hook
• Use Vivid Descriptions and Sensory Details
• Show, Don’t Just Tell
• Reflect on the Significance

How does a narrative essay differ from a biography?

Unlike a Biography Narrative Essay , a narrative essay focuses on a specific event or experience.

Can a narrative essay include fictional elements?

Yes, a narrative essay can blend fact and fiction for creative storytelling.

What is a narrative history essay?

A narrative history essay recounts historical events in a story-like format.

How do you start a narrative essay?

Begin with an engaging hook, setting the scene or introducing key characters.

What are the key components of a narrative essay?

Introduction, plot, characters, climax, and conclusion are essential.

How should a narrative essay be structured?

Follow a chronological order or a logical progression of events.

What tone should a narrative essay have?

The tone can vary but should suit the story’s context and audience.

How do you end a narrative essay?

Conclude by reflecting on the story’s significance or lessons learned.

How important is the setting in a narrative essay?

A well-described setting enhances the story’s mood and context.

What is the purpose of a narrative essay?

To entertain, inform, or convey personal experiences and insights.

Text prompt

• Instructive
• Professional

10 Examples of Public speaking

20 Examples of Gas lighting

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Article Contents

Introduction, who owns narratives, fables in literature and narratives in science, testing the narrative: pattern, process, and story, fables and narratives in human evolution, the story so far …, perspectives from the social sciences on scientific communication, the structure of scientific communication: narrative vs. “anti-narrative”, convincing scientists that narrative is important, moving from “anti-narrative” to narrative: practical suggestions, acknowledgments.

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Narrative and “Anti-narrative” in Science: How Scientists Tell Stories, and Don’t

From the symposium “Science Through Narrative: Engaging Broad Audiences” presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, January 3–7, 2018 at San Francisco, California.

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Kevin Padian, Narrative and “Anti-narrative” in Science: How Scientists Tell Stories, and Don’t, Integrative and Comparative Biology , Volume 58, Issue 6, December 2018, Pages 1224–1234, https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icy038

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Narratives are common to all branches of science, not only to the humanities. Scientists tell stories about how the things we study work, develop, and evolve, and about how we come to be interested in them. Here I add a third domain (Secularity) to Gould’s two “non-overlapping magisteria” of Science and Religion, and I review previous work on the parallels in elements between story-telling in literature and science. The stories of each domain have different criteria for judging them valid or useful. In science, especially historical sciences such as biology and geology, particular scientific methods and approaches both structure and test our narratives. Relying on the narrative assumptions of how certain processes, such as natural selection, are supposed to work is treacherous unless they are tested by appropriate historical patterns, such as phylogeny, and rooted in the process of natural mechanisms. The structure of scientific explanation seen in peer-reviewed papers and grant proposals obscures true narrative within a formulaic sequence of “question, methods, materials” and so on that is quite different from the classic narrative of folk-tales and novels, producing an “anti-narrative” that must be “un-learned” before it can be communicated to non-scientists. By adopting some of the techniques of classic story-telling, scientists can become more effective in making our ideas clear, educating the public, and even attracting funding.

This is a story about how scientists tell stories, and don’t tell stories. Or rather, if you like, it’s about how scientists construct narratives and, as it turns out, “anti-narratives.” Stories are common to all branches of human thought. We scientists tell two kinds of stories. One is about our research: how birds evolved; how trees and forbs became adapted to fire, and how animals adapted to those plants and their landscapes; how a free-living organism was co-opted to become a mitochondrion. The second type of story is our own: how we became interested and even obsessed with our research topics; how we discovered the source of the genes that make the turtle shell; how we discovered the long-lost fossil quarry that established that Tyrannosaurus rex adults and juveniles hunted together.

This is a story about what stories do in science, how we construct them, and how we judge how good they are. For comparison, we’ll look at stories in other realms of human thought. Then we’ll compare how we tell our stories to each other, in the form of scientific publications, with how we can effectively tell stories to non-scientists—or, in common parlance, normal people. This will introduce the concept of “anti-narrative.”

Our stories about our research are of interest to both scientists and non-scientists, and we tell them in different ways to both audiences. Stories about ourselves as scientists are usually of limited interest to other scientists (except if they already know you), but are often of interest to non-scientists, especially if the two types of stories are blended.

Many scientists think that it’s disingenuous to “tell stories” about their research, that this is an unnatural way to explain what they do. To the contrary, the “anti-narrative” of most scientific papers obscures understanding by all but specialists in a sub-field. Narrative is not only natural but necessary. The stakes are high, especially with decreasing support for science and science education, and increasing disrespect and distrust for scientific methods, evidence, and authority, tentative as the last may be.

Gould (2002) meant to smooth the waters between science and religion when he tried to establish them as two “non-overlapping magisteria,” each with truths to tell and very different ways to tell them. For him, the purview of science was the natural world, whereas religion handled theology, morals, and ethics. Neat division: problem solved.

Well, maybe not so much. Missing from Gould’s formulation was consideration of about 90% of what people are usually concerned with: traffic laws, tax structures, schooling their kids, electing responsible public officials, what music to listen to, what movies to watch, how to find meaningful relationships, and so on. These concerns regard neither science nor religion, unless you live in an extreme theocracy where everything recurs to someone’s interpretation of religious doctrine. The fact is that we need a third magisterium, and I propose that we call it the Secular ( Fig. 1 ). We need this magisterium—or, as I would prefer to call it, a Domain—for the quotidian things mentioned above, which cannot conceivably be within the purview of either science or religion. But more fundamentally, we construct our governments in secular terms, unless they are bound by religious laws (contrast theocracy with democracy). Even if the Divine Right of Kings is accepted, that monarchy has to devise practical laws that are neither theological nor scientific (recognizing that the scientific was the same as the theological until the Enlightenment). This is the domain of the Secular. Yes, it marginalizes both religion and science, beyond what Gould conceived. But sometimes there is more than Heaven (religion) and Earth (science) in philosophy.

Above, Gould’s (2002) division of human knowledge into the two “Magisteria” of Religion and Science; below, the division advocated here into the “Domains” of Religion, Secularity, and Science.

Beyond this, most people don’t want sectarian religious views to prescribe morality and ethics to everyone. We develop secular systems of laws and standards of behavior, and systems of government. In the Western world, we’ve been doing it since Plato. Science isn’t involved here, because it’s only interested in questions about the natural world. This is why the third Secular magisterium is critical.

Why be concerned with these magisterial domains? Because it’s important to understand how stories are told, and how they differ among these domains. One might define “myths” as stories that come from cultures other than your own, but the implication is that all cultures have “myths.” What functions do myths serve? They are shared narratives that define and unite a community. They preserve its theology and history. Those stories are the glue of these cultures. Secularity, the second domain, shows us that we can have governments without theology, and histories that aren’t guided by supernatural beings. Those histories forge our governments and our laws. And the majority of our fictional and biographical literature is secular. So stories are important here too.

What about science? Every field of science tells stories. Our stories follow prescribed methods. Each field has its own. We tell stories about how we developed our research projects and came to our discoveries. But not all sciences are about historical phenomena. In the earth sciences and biological sciences, we are. We have stories about the origin of Life, of Pangaea, of whales, of flight. Narrative comes far easier to us.

The bottom line is that all domains tell stories. We tell stories about how our study objects came to be, and about how we came to study them. So let’s consider the structure of narrative, to see just how we tell stories.

The structure of narrative in the folk-tale (the latter after Propp [1925 ] and Landau [1984 , 1991 ])

I will argue here that our professional scientific training un-teaches us how to tell stories, and pushes us into an unfamiliar format that we quickly learn we must master in order to succeed in our profession. In other words, you jump through the hoops to develop a grant proposal, in which you effectively pervert your story of discovery to satisfy a formula that asks you to define a hypothesis and methods and express preliminary results. This is far from a story about quest and discovery. When you write up your results for publication, you get the same perversion of narrative. (More on this later.) Here we want to stress the ubiquity of narrative in domains and ask what makes a good story in each domain.

Beginning with religion, most people will acknowledge that every religion has its stories, which we call myths, unless it’s our own religion, and then it’s a sacred text. Shared narratives define and unite a community, which is usually not only religious but historical and demographic. They preserve its theology and history, and often its morals and ethics.

Secularity shows us that we can have governments without theology (e.g., Plato’s Republic), and histories that aren’t guided by supernatural beings. Those histories forge our governments and our laws. And the majority of our fictional and biographical literature is secular. So stories are important in the secular realm too. They can be creative narratives, ranging from Tess of the D’Urbervilles to 1984. They can be historical narratives that cultures tell themselves, sometimes self-serving, of nations and peoples, from the Old Testament to Manifest Destiny to America First, and even to the Aryan fantasies of the Nazis.

Science is not historically preoccupies with morals and ethics, possibly because ethical and moral propositions are difficult to test empirically; but every field of science tells stories. Our stories follow prescribed methods. Each field has its own, and in two ways. First, in all fields we tell stories about how we developed our research projects and came to our discoveries. But not all sciences are about historical phenomena. In the earth sciences and biological sciences, we are. We have stories about how mammals evolved, the origin of grasslands, and why warm-bloodedness evolved twice in animals. Non-historical sciences such as chemistry and physics have few of these stories, because their phenomena usually do not depend on time and space (Origin of calcium? Origin of quarks?). But they have great stories to tell nonetheless.

What makes a good narrative, regardless of domain? First, an exciting story, with plot twists and challenges, is critical for stories in the domains of religion and secularity. In science we want to know that the researcher has a good problem, with acceptable methods and appropriate materials. Any narrative wants to have a sympathetic protagonist (Jack and his beanstalk; Noah; Harry Potter), and sympathetic scientists study ways to combat disease, to understand ecological relations of species in communities, to learn how animals evolved adaptations critical to meeting new environmental challenges. In this way we also document, in all domains, why our “quest” is important. The protagonist must also act ethically and properly. And we must not leave out the storytelling skills of the author: from Aesop to Sagan, the course of the story must be clear and well-written. And in science, the conclusions must follow the data.

Let’s turn now to a particular story: the origin of what makes us human. Misia Landau, an historical anthropologist, analyzed the stories about the evolution of human features that were developed by 19th century and early 20th century paleontologists ( Landau 1984 , 1991 ). There is a sequence of features—moving left to right in this picture ( Fig. 2 )—of coming down from the trees, going bipedal, getting bigger brains, establishing communication—and these features were universal to all stories. But every story put them in a different order.

Landau’s (1984) comparison of the sequence of evolution of features historically deemed critical to the evolution of humans (bipedality, terrestriality, communication, encephalization), as seen by prominent late 19th- and early 20th century paleoanthropologists (Darwin, Keith, Elliot Smith, Wood Jones, Osborn, and Gregory). Note that each sequence is different.

It became more interesting when Landau took Propp’s (1925) classic folk-tale components and plotted them against the anthropological hypotheses of the sequence of acquisition of human features ( Fig. 3 ). There’s a hero, he has a challenge, he goes on a journey, and so on. But again, in every story the sequence of events was different.

Landau’s (1984) similar depiction, following the same authors as in Fig. 3, of the sequence of events in human evolution, following Propp’s (1925) formulation of the folk-tale narrative. Again, each sequence is different.

How can this be, if science rests on testable hypotheses supported by evidence? The answer is that ironclad evidence is great when you have it; and when you do not, you construct testable hypotheses based on evidence from reasonably similar cases that evince patterns and processes that you expect have been working in your case. But you still have to test these hypotheses as new evidence comes to light. Darwin, Osborn, Keith, Elliot Smith, and the others lacked most of the evidence that we now have—although arguably we still don’t have enough to work out this sequence unambiguously. Knowing what they knew, they tried to reconstruct how the features of humans were assembled.

So the question we ask now is whether and how we can discriminate among stories to try to decide which has greater merit. Is it enough for science merely to prefer one story over another? All those narratives about the journey of the hominid hero—don’t they presume that each step in this journey is adaptive, shaped by natural selection? Gould and Lewontin (1979) famously attacked this assumption in their paper about the spandrels of the cathedral of San Marco. Are we just telling stories about evolution, they asked, if we convince ourselves that every evolutionary pathway is shaped by natural selection?

Dolf Seilacher found a way out of the adaptationist paradigm by showing that more than ecology and adaptation can shape morphology ( Seilacher and Gishlick 2014 ; Fig. 4 ). Phylogenetic legacy—doing or making a feature or behavior because your lineage has always done it that way—can explain a lot. For example, all sensible water birds—gulls, pelicans, shearwaters—catch fishes in their beaks. But the osprey grabs prey with its feet. That’s because it’s an eagle, and that’s how raptors do it. Seilacher called that phylogenetic legacy.

Seilacher’s formulation of Konstruktionsmorphologie (constructional morphology), in which simple adaptationist evolutionary stories are replaced by a triumvirate of factors that also include phylogenetic legacy and material properties (see Seilacher and Gishlick 2014 ).

Another important factor determining morphology is material parameters, or the features of the skeleton itself. For example, if the inorganic component of our bones were made of silica instead of calcium phosphate, how would our movements be different?

These latter two factors are alternatives, or if you will, complements, to the “adaptationist paradigm” in testable scientific terms. They are an antidote to the notion that natural selection is pervasive and all-powerful, even when selection is not measured. And they remind us what we are responsible for testing and not simply assuming. However, it can be argued that neither Eldredge and Gould nor Seilacher provided sufficient criteria by which to assess adaptation (the result of natural selection) or alternative explanations. It is one thing to show that there is no evidence in a given case of natural selection, but that does not show that it did not act. A complete explanation would provide the phylogenetic pattern of related organisms that show the sequence of the acquisition of features, and the processes by which these features evolved.

A different criticism of an adaptationist paradigm, fueled by natural selection, has always come from our loyal opposition, the creationists. This one is important to take seriously, because polls have shown for decades that a plurality of Americans don’t just misunderstand evolution, they reject it. It’s easy for evolutionists to make up a story, for example, about how a bacterial flagellum could have evolved from small mutations in proteins that “favored” a propulsive tail. Intelligent design advocates, on the other hand, could as easily claim that the flagellum is too complex to evolve, because if any of its 40 proteins is removed, the flagellum stops working (these and other creationist crypto-problems are detailed in Wells [2002 ]; for a critical review see Padian and Gishlick [2002 ]).

Two competing stories; how do we resolve them? One way is by attacking the creationist story because it would require supernatural intervention, which may be possible but is outside the purview of science (at least since the Enlightenment). Another way is to test our hypotheses using the methodology of the natural sciences. Any hypothesis about how a feature or function involved requires a phylogenetic hypothesis ( Eldredge and Cracraft 1980 ; Brooks and McLennan 1991 ). Applying phylogenetic methods, the pattern clearly shows that the locomotory function of the bacterial flagellum is a derived condition. It turns out that the flagellum works as a propeller even when it lacks a great many of its proteins, but if it lacks too many it still plays a role in the T2 immune system. Using phylogenetic analysis, we can show how outgroups to the locomotory bacteria have other functions, and that a propeller function plausibly evolved from these (the diversity of bacterial flagella is explored in Chen et al. [2011] , the transformations of structures and functions are exemplified in Van Ditmarsch et al. [2013 ] and Wong et al. [2007 ], and evolutionary and phylogenetic considerations are taken up by Pallen et al. [2006 ] and Pallen and Matzke [2006 ]). However, as noted above, the pattern is not enough to establish a complete evolutionary explanation; we also need to understand the processes and mechanisms behind it ( Padian 1987 ). In this way the story becomes not only about what happened, but about how; and hypotheses of process and pattern become mutually testable.

Note that two kinds of stories are being told here. The first is the explanation of what happened: the process of evolution. The second is the story of the pattern of phylogeny, against which we test the story of process. This is how we escape the creationist conundrum, and the sometime criticisms of other domains against scientific explanation. Unlike most ways of thought in other domains, scientists are constantly asking themselves “How would I know if I’m wrong?” Our stories are self-correcting, so they are constantly developing.

A series of statements about natural selection

Some are plausible, some are not; two are tautologies; some are uncertain; most need to be tested, not assumed. All of them affect our stories about natural selection and evolution.

Landau (1984 , 1991 ), following Propp (1925) , neatly showed the parallels between fables—literary stories—and reconstructions of events in the historical sciences (note that “historical” contains the term “story”). The “quest” motif, when applied to origins and evolution of specific taxa and adaptations, can take on an orthogenetic cast, as if the fates of the organic beings in question were pre-ordained. (This is why Darwin avoided the term “evolution” in The Origin of Species : in his day the word denoted predetermined processes such as the development of an insect larva or the fiddlehead of a fern.)

But there are other kinds of fables that historical scientists tell each other. Many of these have historically been lodged in the discipline of human evolution or paleo-anthropology, and more recently in “evolutionary psychology” and “evolutionary medicine.” (The last two fields appear to be founded partly on the tenets that most or all of our psychological features are adaptations and we should study them as such, and that clinical approaches to human health should recognize how the human body has adapted, or not, to its environmental conditions: both adhere to the “adaptationist program.”)

More generally, in terms of basic structures and functions, ideas about human evolution have tended either to take an adaptationist approach to our features, or to select another primate as a “model” for how our human features may have evolved ( Zuk 2014 ). An example of the former is the supposition that our hominid ancestors were adapted for long-distance running on plains and savannahs. Yes, a few living groups of hunter–gatherers pursue this strategy to hunt ungulates on vast plains. But this notion as a general proposition may be unlikely for several reasons. Our remote ancestors were arboreal; our metatarsals are short and our gait is plantigrade (fast-running animals are digitigrade or unguligrade); and human runners suffer a variety of back, hip, leg, and foot problems that non-human runners do not. Compared with arboreal ape outgroups, humans are better adapted for terrestrial progression. But we would have to know much more about the primordial climates, environments, and social organization of ancient hominins (and to assume that they were uniform in time and space, which is unlikely) before this hypothesis would be strongly testable.

An example of the latter (“primate model”) approach begins with the contention that the bonobo ( Pan paniscus ), because like humans it has low intersexual difference in size (often mischaracterized as “sexual dimorphism”), might be a good “model” for what our human ancestors were like. Because the bonobo experiences a tremendous amount of social interaction through sexual intercourse (which does not result in a higher reproductive rate than in other primates) that is promiscuous with respect to sex, age, and social status, some primatologists have argued that polygamy was the original hominin condition (e.g., Ryan and Jethá [2010 ], but see Saxon [2012 ] and Zuk [2014]).

Regardless of the potential validity of this proposition, the bonobo is not an apt comparison, for reasons that relate both to phylogenetic pattern and evolutionary process. First, it is phylogenetically unusual, and even unique, among apes in its sexual behavior. Second, it is only distantly related to Homo sapiens : its closest relative is the chimp Pan troglodytes and then (if one excludes the gorillas) the general hominin lineage, beginning with “australopiths” and including Paranthropus and Homo habilis , Homo erectus , Homo ramidus , and so on—all of which have higher intersexual differences than the bonobo (so low difference in bonobos and us is merely convergent). The chimp and human lineages are generally held to have diverged 5–7 million years ago. Third, the bonobo is the smallest member of the primate group under consideration, so we would hypothesize that lower sexual difference evolved merely on the basis of the evolutionary process of allometry: Paranthropus robustus is the smallest known hominin with adequately characterized male and female features (assuming that males and females are adequately characterized), and its intersexual difference is lower than in all other apes except us ( McHenry 1992 ). But the small sexual difference in us humans, being among the larger apes, is actually something to explain evolutionarily (by testing hypotheses). For all these reasons, plus the rare incidence of polygamy in living human groups, the bonobo is a poor model for ancestral humans, let alone hominins in general. This example shows how evolutionary narratives can be tested by processes and patterns of evolution.

Stories are universally told in all domains (secular, religious, and scientific). They transmit culture, hold together traditions, and recount shared histories. Stories in all these domains have common features. Differences often relate to values placed on elements of a story: some elements reaffirm cultural identity or moral lessons, some provide a great plot, and some are testable and use methods accepted by the community in question. Stories in science, like others, can be based on belief; but if they aren’t both testable and tested, they remain simply stories. And in evolutionary biology, stories with narrative sequences can be tested by phylogenies, and by knowledge of evolutionary, developmental, and physiological processes.

It will not surprise most readers that scientific communication is a strong focus of social science in both theory (e.g., Norris et al. 2005 ; Avraamidou and Osborne 2009 ) and practice (e.g., Dahlstrom 2014 ). The role of narrative is a cynosure for several reasons. Avraamidou and Osborne (2009) discuss the different ways in which stories can be told in science, and compare their major features and efficacies. Theirs is a good introduction to the literature on the uses of narrative in science. Other studies focus on how science communication actually works. Dahlstrom, for example, asks about the relationship between scientists and journalists when telling their stories. Is it ethical to persuade or only to communicate objectively? What responsibility do both the scientist and journalist have to their audience? Given that media outlets generally have a public and sponsors to satisfy, what are their choices in choosing and presenting stories?

A full consideration of social science perspectives on science communication is outside the scope of this paper, but interested readers may wish to consult journals such as Science Communication and Public Understanding of Science as well the recent National Academy of Sciences report on science communication at https://www.nap.edu/catalog/23674/communicating-science-effectively-a-research-agenda .

We move now from “What makes a good story in science?” to “How does what we do differ from how we explain it?” The latter question is fundamental to how we translate our research—our “stories”—from how we communicate it. What I call “anti-narrative” is what happens when scientists translate their work into peer-reviewed articles and grant proposals. This is a simulacrum of scientific work, the classic formula of the “scientific method” that is still purveyed in schoolbooks (but for an antidote, see https://undsci.berkeley.edu/ ): state the problem, provide your methods and materials, lay out your experiment, list your results, discuss the conclusions of your work.

Comparison of the format of a typical scientific article with the structure of narrative in the folk-tale (the latter after Propp [1925 ] and Landau [1984 , 1991 ])

Take the example of the discovery of Tiktaalik, one of the most exciting events in recent paleontology ( Daeschler et al. 2006a , 2006b ). The articles describing it in Nature were perfectly competent; but they were disjointed with respect to the story of the work, as scientific literature forcibly is. The authors discussed first the geology of the area, then the conditions of preservation in the sediments. Then they named and described the new animal. They estimated where it belonged in the family tree of vertebrates. Then they talked about biogeography. At the very end they discussed what some of the unusual and possibly transitional features of the new animal might mean for vertebrate evolution. And that was it.

In contrast, if you watch Neil Shubin explain the find on YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=yvDQCa7rleI ), he tells you why they undertook the work to begin with; what the importance of any results would be; how they knew where to look; how many frozen field seasons they had to work in Greenland before they got lucky; how one crew member always had to stand guard with a rifle, watching for polar bears; and how exciting it was when Steve Gatesy unearthed the first bones of Tiktaalik and they realized what it was.

Should all that information be part of a formal scientific report? Perhaps not all. But a sense of discovery enhances your readers’ sense of the importance of what you’re reporting and why you undertook the work. This is not part of the standard “anti-narrative” of scientific publication. Even the Abstract, which is an opportunity to incorporate such aspects, is often wasted on a “table of contents” approach or a litany of the paper’s topics in an oddly passive voice (“Here a new species is described …”; “Implications are discussed”). Ironically, submissions to journals are now often required to have a “non-technical abstract” (that is of course not published) in which the authors are presumably meant to explain what they did to someone who isn’t a specialist. But this still doesn’t guarantee that a real “story” about the research will be told.

Because Science Communication is not (yet) considered a primary objective of graduate education, beginning scientists have to learn osmotically how to present their research to the public. There are good reasons to do this. First, you will become a better teacher. You improve by becoming used to thinking of your audience’s needs and about what they already know and don’t know about what you’re telling them. You also think about how they can most effectively hear what you’re trying to say, and that determines how you present it. Second, it can help with grant proposals. Reviewers often have a lot of competing projects to sort out. Projects will command more interest (and we hope higher scores in the end) if they are written in prose that is not situated in impenetrable jargon, and comes quickly to the importance of the work through an accessible narrative. And third, potential donors to your work will be more interested in contributing if they understand it. This means not only using accessible language and avoiding jargon, but telling the story about how you got interested in the work, why it’s important, what it can lead to, and how you’ve engaged others in the work (especially students: donors love to know that students are getting that “eureka” moment in their training).

There are two obstacles to overcome: the public perception of scientists, and your training as a scientist. The days of automatic respect for anyone with a degree are long over; organized campaigns against established knowledge serve a variety of contemporary political, economic, and social purposes ( Nichols 2017 ). The kindly old doctor and the helpful humanitarian scientist of the books and films of the last mid-century have been replaced, increasingly since the advent of the atomic bomb, by caricatures of myopic, narcissistic misanthropes only out for their own glory (and income from allegedly lucrative government grants), if not outright bent on world domination and destruction. The late Senator William Proxmire famously gave “Golden Fleece Awards” to scientific projects that he felt were a waste of time and money because they had no direct relevance to economic or medical advancement. Current Senator Rand Paul is taking this a step farther by proposing that members of the public, uneducated in scientific research, should sit on panels that judge grant proposals ( Mervis 2017 ). Scientists should take note: if you haven’t made clear why what you’re doing is important and worthy of funding, you may lose it. Consider the US Congressional election of 1994, when Representative Newt Gingrich led a charge of new Republicans to defund all government agencies that they found wanting in relevance or productivity. The US Geological Survey was greatly reduced in its resources, scope, and personnel, whereas NASA, although its funding was cut, survived in more its traditional form. NASA had spent decades educating every schoolchild about the excitement and value of space exploration; the USGS had spent comparatively little educating them about why we should know about watersheds, climate, natural resources, and the hazards of floods and earthquakes. So there is much at stake in showing more than your immediate colleagues—“the twelve people in the world who are interested in your study,” as one commentator put it—why your work is interesting.

Consider a practical example: during the trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005 (see Padian and Matzke 2009 ), US Federal judge John Jones III had to decide whether “Intelligent Design,” a scientifically unreviewed idea about the detection of supernatural influence on natural processes, could be permitted to be taught as science in public schools. There was, to say the least, a lot at stake here. We scientists on the side of the plaintiffs knew that we would have to make our scientific philosophy, methods, and evidence very plain and understandable to the judge, who was well-educated but not a specialist in science. So we fit our testimony squarely into the framework of a narrative about how science is done and what its rules are. A sample of this can be found in my own testimony ( https://ncse.com/creationism/legal/padians-expert-testimony ), which was greatly improved by trying to explain science to our scientifically unlearned attorneys. The expert witnesses on the other side, in contrast, tended to use complicated explanations and jargon that left the judge stymied. The result was perhaps the most one-sided victory in American jurisprudence ( https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file577_23137.pdf ).

To be effective, we had to make scientific language accessible and memorable. So, instead of describing to the judge the “avian carpometacarpal joint,” I used the term “the pointy part of the Kentucky Fried Chicken wing.” (Shortly thereafter, he broke court for lunch.) The memorable matters: The last words of testimony in the trial were repeated by Judge Jones in his decision: “Padian bluntly and effectively stated that in confusing students about science generally and evolution in particular, the disclaimer makes students ’stupid.” That’s not the kind of language that a scientist would use every day; but there are times to say things for effect. And scientific narratives have to be effective.

How then do we overcome our training to fit research into an “anti-narrative” format and to obscure prose with inaccessible jargon? We have to “un-learn” what we’ve been taught.

1. Spend more time explaining what you do to “normal” people in an informal setting. If you only talk to your labmates and a few other colleagues in your department, consider starting with your non-scientist roommates and friends, undergraduates whom you may be teaching a completely different subject, and others whom you know socially through community or church groups. Because they know you as a person, they will be sympathetic. Present your story to them and ask for all possible questions and feedback. The seemingly least important or relevant query may turn out to be critical in revising your narrative.

2. Begin not with “here’s what I do” but “here’s how I got interested in what I do, and why it’s important.” As you explain your work, like the hero in Propp’s folktales, you’ll make clear how the problem presented itself to you, how you undertook your “quest,” what the obstacles were, how you got help from others, and how you arrived at some real ground-breaking discovery. And don’t omit to explain why you’re the right person to do this work. Sometimes you get lucky, but fortune favors the prepared mind, and you’ve had valuable training that your audience will want to appreciate. That’s your story.

3. Develop a series of talking points, a 30-s “elevator pitch,” or an illustration you can quickly sketch on anything from a napkin to a tablet that will get across the gist of your research in accessible language in a very brief period of time. You can practice them with a variety of familiar audiences and use them when appropriate—notably with potential donors.

4. Consider doing your next poster at a scientific meeting with virtually no text—or as little as possible. No abstract, no methods, no conclusions; minimal data. Put labels on figures only to show indispensable structures. This will not work with every subject, but will work with more than you might think. Write a title that conveys the problem, not the answer: “How do monarch butterflies find milkweed?” rather than “The role of glysophate in monarch butterfly chemoreception”. Use a wordless flow of arrows and symbols to connect illustrations (which now can be larger). You provide the words when people visit your poster. You make eye contact immediately; you don’t have to wait politely while they look over and try to read your paragraphs and decide if they have any questions for you, or if they’ll just move on.

5. Write a popular article about an aspect of your research—particularly one that lends itself to a narrative format—for a general audience. It could be for the newsletter of a naturalists’ club, a local newspaper, or a house organ of your institution. The last option is particularly attractive if it reaches an audience of alumni, because they particularly enjoy hearing that good teaching and research still thrive at their institution. If you mention the stories of students who work with you and become trained and inspired, the effect more than doubles. Alumni interest quite frequently translates into contributions to research.

There are many good reasons for scientists to tell their stories more effectively. Scientists are increasingly dehumanized and marginalized in social discourse and popular media. Threats to scientific research, and even to the credibility of scientists concerning scientific problems, are continually mounting. As government funding for research decreases, scientists increasingly need to reach the public to turn the tide of mistrust and misunderstanding and to attract funding from new, largely private sources. Private donors are usually highly intelligent, but may not be familiar with your particular field, so you will need a narrative that reaches them. Better stories also reach students, who tend to remember lecturers and course material that are presented in an interesting way, and who often go on to influence public policy and to contribute to their university’s programs.

But to be effective, scientists have to “un-learn” what we’ve been told is good science in presenting our research and grant proposals, and develop instead a good story about science. Recur to the consideration above of “what makes a good story?” Maybe it doesn’t hurt to incorporate some elements of the folk-tale—at least when you want to tell a good story to an audience and engage reporters, administrators, donors, funders, and the general public.

Another of those elements is a sympathetic protagonist. When audiences get to know you, understand your dedication to and passion for your work, and see how your research will advance important questions, you will gain their sympathy—even if your work will not yield great benefits to medicine or technology. The takeaway is that when you tell your story you get people excited about science. And when you explain your methods, they understand how science is done and why it’s important that science has methods different from those of other Domains of human knowledge.

The impetus finally to write up the ideas in this paper, which I have been teaching for many years, is due to the invitation to participate in the SICB symposium Science Through Narrative: Engaging Broad Audiences, presented at the 2018 SICB Meeting in San Francisco. I thank Sara ElShafie and the other organizers and presenters, Ken Miller for new references on the bacterial flagellum, and Carl Zimmer for useful discussion. This manuscript was greatly improved by reviews from Geerat J. Vermeij and an anonymous referee who provided useful references from the social sciences.

I thank the Sakana Foundation and the Uplands Foundation for support of this work.

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The Ultimate Narrative Essay Guide for Beginners

A narrative essay tells a story in chronological order, with an introduction that introduces the characters and sets the scene. Then a series of events leads to a climax or turning point, and finally a resolution or reflection on the experience.

Speaking of which, are you in sixes and sevens about narrative essays? Don’t worry this ultimate expert guide will wipe out all your doubts. So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

Everything You Need to Know About Narrative Essay

What is a narrative essay.

When you go through a narrative essay definition, you would know that a narrative essay purpose is to tell a story. It’s all about sharing an experience or event and is different from other types of essays because it’s more focused on how the event made you feel or what you learned from it, rather than just presenting facts or an argument. Let’s explore more details on this interesting write-up and get to know how to write a narrative essay.

Elements of a Narrative Essay

Here’s a breakdown of the key elements of a narrative essay:

A narrative essay has a beginning, middle, and end. It builds up tension and excitement and then wraps things up in a neat package.

Real people, including the writer, often feature in personal narratives. Details of the characters and their thoughts, feelings, and actions can help readers to relate to the tale.

It’s really important to know when and where something happened so we can get a good idea of the context. Going into detail about what it looks like helps the reader to really feel like they’re part of the story.

Conflict or Challenge 

A story in a narrative essay usually involves some kind of conflict or challenge that moves the plot along. It could be something inside the character, like a personal battle, or something from outside, like an issue they have to face in the world.

Theme or Message

A narrative essay isn’t just about recounting an event – it’s about showing the impact it had on you and what you took away from it. It’s an opportunity to share your thoughts and feelings about the experience, and how it changed your outlook.

Emotional Impact

The author is trying to make the story they’re telling relatable, engaging, and memorable by using language and storytelling to evoke feelings in whoever’s reading it.

Narrative essays let writers have a blast telling stories about their own lives. It’s an opportunity to share insights and impart wisdom, or just have some fun with the reader. Descriptive language, sensory details, dialogue, and a great narrative voice are all essentials for making the story come alive.

The Purpose of a Narrative Essay

A narrative essay is more than just a story – it’s a way to share a meaningful, engaging, and relatable experience with the reader. Includes:

Sharing Personal Experience

Narrative essays are a great way for writers to share their personal experiences, feelings, thoughts, and reflections. It’s an opportunity to connect with readers and make them feel something.

Entertainment and Engagement

The essay attempts to keep the reader interested by using descriptive language, storytelling elements, and a powerful voice. It attempts to pull them in and make them feel involved by creating suspense, mystery, or an emotional connection.

Conveying a Message or Insight

Narrative essays are more than just a story – they aim to teach you something. They usually have a moral lesson, a new understanding, or a realization about life that the author gained from the experience.

Building Empathy and Understanding

By telling their stories, people can give others insight into different perspectives, feelings, and situations. Sharing these tales can create compassion in the reader and help broaden their knowledge of different life experiences.

Inspiration and Motivation

Stories about personal struggles, successes, and transformations can be really encouraging to people who are going through similar situations. It can provide them with hope and guidance, and let them know that they’re not alone.

Reflecting on Life’s Significance

These essays usually make you think about the importance of certain moments in life or the impact of certain experiences. They make you look deep within yourself and ponder on the things you learned or how you changed because of those events.

Demonstrating Writing Skills

Coming up with a gripping narrative essay takes serious writing chops, like vivid descriptions, powerful language, timing, and organization. It’s an opportunity for writers to show off their story-telling abilities.

Preserving Personal History

Sometimes narrative essays are used to record experiences and special moments that have an emotional resonance. They can be used to preserve individual memories or for future generations to look back on.

Cultural and Societal Exploration

Personal stories can look at cultural or social aspects, giving us an insight into customs, opinions, or social interactions seen through someone’s own experience.

Format of a Narrative Essay

Narrative essays are quite flexible in terms of format, which allows the writer to tell a story in a creative and compelling way. Here’s a quick breakdown of the narrative essay format, along with some examples:

Introduction

Set the scene and introduce the story.

Engage the reader and establish the tone of the narrative.

Hook: Start with a captivating opening line to grab the reader’s attention. For instance:

Example:  “The scorching sun beat down on us as we trekked through the desert, our water supply dwindling.”

Background Information: Provide necessary context or background without giving away the entire story.

Example:  “It was the summer of 2015 when I embarked on a life-changing journey to…”

Thesis Statement or Narrative Purpose

Present the main idea or the central message of the essay.

Offer a glimpse of what the reader can expect from the narrative.

Thesis Statement: This isn’t as rigid as in other essays but can be a sentence summarizing the essence of the story.

Example:  “Little did I know, that seemingly ordinary hike would teach me invaluable lessons about resilience and friendship.”

Body Paragraphs

Present the sequence of events in chronological order.

Develop characters, setting, conflict, and resolution.

Story Progression : Describe events in the order they occurred, focusing on details that evoke emotions and create vivid imagery.

Example : Detail the trek through the desert, the challenges faced, interactions with fellow hikers, and the pivotal moments.

Character Development : Introduce characters and their roles in the story. Show their emotions, thoughts, and actions.

Example : Describe how each character reacted to the dwindling water supply and supported each other through adversity.

Dialogue and Interactions : Use dialogue to bring the story to life and reveal character personalities.

Example : “Sarah handed me her last bottle of water, saying, ‘We’re in this together.'”

Reach the peak of the story, the moment of highest tension or significance.

Turning Point: Highlight the most crucial moment or realization in the narrative.

Example:  “As the sun dipped below the horizon and hope seemed lost, a distant sound caught our attention—the rescue team’s helicopters.”

Provide closure to the story.

Reflect on the significance of the experience and its impact.

Reflection : Summarize the key lessons learned or insights gained from the experience.

Example : “That hike taught me the true meaning of resilience and the invaluable support of friendship in challenging times.”

Closing Thought : End with a memorable line that reinforces the narrative’s message or leaves a lasting impression.

Example : “As we boarded the helicopters, I knew this adventure would forever be etched in my heart.”

Example Summary:

Imagine a narrative about surviving a challenging hike through the desert, emphasizing the bonds formed and lessons learned. The narrative essay structure might look like starting with an engaging scene, narrating the hardships faced, showcasing the characters’ resilience, and culminating in a powerful realization about friendship and endurance.

Different Types of Narrative Essays

There are a bunch of different types of narrative essays – each one focuses on different elements of storytelling and has its own purpose. Here’s a breakdown of the narrative essay types and what they mean.

Personal Narrative

Description : Tells a personal story or experience from the writer’s life.

Purpose: Reflects on personal growth, lessons learned, or significant moments.

Example of Narrative Essay Types:

Topic : “The Day I Conquered My Fear of Public Speaking”

Focus: Details the experience, emotions, and eventual triumph over a fear of public speaking during a pivotal event.

Descriptive Narrative

Description : Emphasizes vivid details and sensory imagery.

Purpose : Creates a sensory experience, painting a vivid picture for the reader.

Topic : “A Walk Through the Enchanted Forest”

Focus : Paints a detailed picture of the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings experienced during a walk through a mystical forest.

Autobiographical Narrative

Description: Chronicles significant events or moments from the writer’s life.

Purpose: Provides insights into the writer’s life, experiences, and growth.

Topic: “Lessons from My Childhood: How My Grandmother Shaped Who I Am”

Focus: Explores pivotal moments and lessons learned from interactions with a significant family member.

Experiential Narrative

Description: Relays experiences beyond the writer’s personal life.

Purpose: Shares experiences, travels, or events from a broader perspective.

Topic: “Volunteering in a Remote Village: A Journey of Empathy”

Focus: Chronicles the writer’s volunteering experience, highlighting interactions with a community and personal growth.

Literary Narrative

Description: Incorporates literary elements like symbolism, allegory, or thematic explorations.

Purpose: Uses storytelling for deeper explorations of themes or concepts.

Topic: “The Symbolism of the Red Door: A Journey Through Change”

Focus: Uses a red door as a symbol, exploring its significance in the narrator’s life and the theme of transition.

Historical Narrative

Description: Recounts historical events or periods through a personal lens.

Purpose: Presents history through personal experiences or perspectives.

Topic: “A Grandfather’s Tales: Living Through the Great Depression”

Focus: Shares personal stories from a family member who lived through a historical era, offering insights into that period.

Digital or Multimedia Narrative

Description: Incorporates multimedia elements like images, videos, or audio to tell a story.

Purpose: Explores storytelling through various digital platforms or formats.

Topic: “A Travel Diary: Exploring Europe Through Vlogs”

Focus: Combines video clips, photos, and personal narration to document a travel experience.

How to Choose a Topic for Your Narrative Essay?

Selecting a compelling topic for your narrative essay is crucial as it sets the stage for your storytelling. Choosing a boring topic is one of the narrative essay mistakes to avoid . Here’s a detailed guide on how to choose the right topic:

Reflect on Personal Experiences

• Significant Moments:

Moments that had a profound impact on your life or shaped your perspective.

Example: A moment of triumph, overcoming a fear, a life-changing decision, or an unforgettable experience.

• Emotional Resonance:

Events that evoke strong emotions or feelings.

Example: Joy, fear, sadness, excitement, or moments of realization.

• Lessons Learned:

Experiences that taught you valuable lessons or brought about personal growth.

Example: Challenges that led to personal development, shifts in mindset, or newfound insights.

Explore Unique Perspectives

• Uncommon Experiences:

Unique or unconventional experiences that might captivate the reader’s interest.

Example: Unusual travels, interactions with different cultures, or uncommon hobbies.

• Different Points of View:

Stories from others’ perspectives that impacted you deeply.

Example: A family member’s story, a friend’s experience, or a historical event from a personal lens.

Focus on Specific Themes or Concepts

• Themes or Concepts of Interest:

Themes or ideas you want to explore through storytelling.

Example: Friendship, resilience, identity, cultural diversity, or personal transformation.

• Symbolism or Metaphor:

Using symbols or metaphors as the core of your narrative.

Example: Exploring the symbolism of an object or a place in relation to a broader theme.

Consider Your Audience and Purpose

• Relevance to Your Audience:

Topics that resonate with your audience’s interests or experiences.

Example: Choose a relatable theme or experience that your readers might connect with emotionally.

• Impact or Message:

What message or insight do you want to convey through your story?

Example: Choose a topic that aligns with the message or lesson you aim to impart to your readers.

Brainstorm and Evaluate Ideas

• Free Writing or Mind Mapping:

Process: Write down all potential ideas without filtering. Mind maps or free-writing exercises can help generate diverse ideas.

• Evaluate Feasibility:

The depth of the story, the availability of vivid details, and your personal connection to the topic.

Imagine you’re considering topics for a narrative essay. You reflect on your experiences and decide to explore the topic of “Overcoming Stage Fright: How a School Play Changed My Perspective.” This topic resonates because it involves a significant challenge you faced and the personal growth it brought about.

Narrative Essay Topics

50 easy narrative essay topics.

• Learning to Ride a Bike
• My First Day of School
• A Surprise Birthday Party
• The Day I Got Lost
• Visiting a Haunted House
• An Encounter with a Wild Animal
• My Favorite Childhood Toy
• The Best Vacation I Ever Had
• An Unforgettable Family Gathering
• Conquering a Fear of Heights
• A Special Gift I Received
• Moving to a New City
• The Most Memorable Meal
• Getting Caught in a Rainstorm
• An Act of Kindness I Witnessed
• The First Time I Cooked a Meal
• My Experience with a New Hobby
• The Day I Met My Best Friend
• A Hike in the Mountains
• Learning a New Language
• An Embarrassing Moment
• Dealing with a Bully
• My First Job Interview
• A Sporting Event I Attended
• The Scariest Dream I Had
• Helping a Stranger
• The Joy of Achieving a Goal
• A Road Trip Adventure
• Overcoming a Personal Challenge
• The Significance of a Family Tradition
• An Unusual Pet I Owned
• A Misunderstanding with a Friend
• Exploring an Abandoned Building
• My Favorite Book and Why
• The Impact of a Role Model
• A Cultural Celebration I Participated In
• A Valuable Lesson from a Teacher
• A Trip to the Zoo
• An Unplanned Adventure
• Volunteering Experience
• A Moment of Forgiveness
• A Decision I Regretted
• A Special Talent I Have
• The Importance of Family Traditions
• The Thrill of Performing on Stage
• A Moment of Sudden Inspiration
• The Meaning of Home
• Learning to Play a Musical Instrument
• A Childhood Memory at the Park
• Witnessing a Beautiful Sunset

Narrative Essay Topics for College Students

• Discovering a New Passion
• Overcoming Academic Challenges
• Navigating Cultural Differences
• Embracing Independence: Moving Away from Home
• Exploring Career Aspirations
• Coping with Stress in College
• The Impact of a Mentor in My Life
• Balancing Work and Studies
• Facing a Fear of Public Speaking
• Exploring a Semester Abroad
• The Evolution of My Study Habits
• Volunteering Experience That Changed My Perspective
• The Role of Technology in Education
• Finding Balance: Social Life vs. Academics
• Learning a New Skill Outside the Classroom
• Reflecting on Freshman Year Challenges
• The Joys and Struggles of Group Projects
• My Experience with Internship or Work Placement
• Challenges of Time Management in College
• Redefining Success Beyond Grades
• The Influence of Literature on My Thinking
• The Impact of Social Media on College Life
• Overcoming Procrastination
• Lessons from a Leadership Role
• Exploring Diversity on Campus
• Exploring Passion for Environmental Conservation
• An Eye-Opening Course That Changed My Perspective
• Living with Roommates: Challenges and Lessons
• The Significance of Extracurricular Activities
• The Influence of a Professor on My Academic Journey
• Discussing Mental Health in College
• The Evolution of My Career Goals
• Confronting Personal Biases Through Education
• The Experience of Attending a Conference or Symposium
• Challenges Faced by Non-Native English Speakers in College
• The Impact of Traveling During Breaks
• Exploring Identity: Cultural or Personal
• The Impact of Music or Art on My Life
• Addressing Diversity in the Classroom
• Exploring Entrepreneurial Ambitions
• My Experience with Research Projects
• Overcoming Impostor Syndrome in College
• The Importance of Networking in College
• Finding Resilience During Tough Times
• The Impact of Global Issues on Local Perspectives
• The Influence of Family Expectations on Education
• Lessons from a Part-Time Job
• Exploring the College Sports Culture
• The Role of Technology in Modern Education
• The Journey of Self-Discovery Through Education

Narrative Essay Comparison

Narrative essay vs. descriptive essay.

Here’s our first narrative essay comparison! While both narrative and descriptive essays focus on vividly portraying a subject or an event, they differ in their primary objectives and approaches. Now, let’s delve into the nuances of comparison on narrative essays.

Narrative Essay:

Storytelling: Focuses on narrating a personal experience or event.

Chronological Order: Follows a structured timeline of events to tell a story.

Message or Lesson: Often includes a central message, moral, or lesson learned from the experience.

Engagement: Aims to captivate the reader through a compelling storyline and character development.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s point of view, using “I” and expressing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Emphasizes a plot with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Character Development: Focuses on describing characters, their interactions, emotions, and growth.

Conflict or Challenge: Usually involves a central conflict or challenge that drives the narrative forward.

Dialogue: Incorporates conversations to bring characters and their interactions to life.

Reflection: Concludes with reflection or insight gained from the experience.

Descriptive Essay:

Vivid Description: Aims to vividly depict a person, place, object, or event.

Imagery and Details: Focuses on sensory details to create a vivid image in the reader’s mind.

Emotion through Description: Uses descriptive language to evoke emotions and engage the reader’s senses.

Painting a Picture: Creates a sensory-rich description allowing the reader to visualize the subject.

Imagery and Sensory Details: Focuses on providing rich sensory descriptions, using vivid language and adjectives.

Point of Focus: Concentrates on describing a specific subject or scene in detail.

Spatial Organization: Often employs spatial organization to describe from one area or aspect to another.

Objective Observations: Typically avoids the use of personal opinions or emotions; instead, the focus remains on providing a detailed and objective description.

Comparison:

Focus: Narrative essays emphasize storytelling, while descriptive essays focus on vividly describing a subject or scene.

Perspective: Narrative essays are often written from a first-person perspective, while descriptive essays may use a more objective viewpoint.

Purpose: Narrative essays aim to convey a message or lesson through a story, while descriptive essays aim to paint a detailed picture for the reader without necessarily conveying a specific message.

Narrative Essay vs. Argumentative Essay

The narrative essay and the argumentative essay serve distinct purposes and employ different approaches:

Engagement and Emotion: Aims to captivate the reader through a compelling story.

Reflective: Often includes reflection on the significance of the experience or lessons learned.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s point of view, sharing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Emphasizes a storyline with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Message or Lesson: Conveys a central message, moral, or insight derived from the experience.

Argumentative Essay:

Persuasion and Argumentation: Aims to persuade the reader to adopt the writer’s viewpoint on a specific topic.

Logical Reasoning: Presents evidence, facts, and reasoning to support a particular argument or stance.

Debate and Counterarguments: Acknowledge opposing views and counter them with evidence and reasoning.

Thesis Statement: Includes a clear thesis statement that outlines the writer’s position on the topic.

Thesis and Evidence: Starts with a strong thesis statement and supports it with factual evidence, statistics, expert opinions, or logical reasoning.

Counterarguments: Addresses opposing viewpoints and provides rebuttals with evidence.

Logical Structure: Follows a logical structure with an introduction, body paragraphs presenting arguments and evidence, and a conclusion reaffirming the thesis.

Formal Language: Uses formal language and avoids personal anecdotes or emotional appeals.

Objective: Argumentative essays focus on presenting a logical argument supported by evidence, while narrative essays prioritize storytelling and personal reflection.

Purpose: Argumentative essays aim to persuade and convince the reader of a particular viewpoint, while narrative essays aim to engage, entertain, and share personal experiences.

Structure: Narrative essays follow a storytelling structure with character development and plot, while argumentative essays follow a more formal, structured approach with logical arguments and evidence.

In essence, while both essays involve writing and presenting information, the narrative essay focuses on sharing a personal experience, whereas the argumentative essay aims to persuade the audience by presenting a well-supported argument.

Narrative Essay vs. Personal Essay

While there can be an overlap between narrative and personal essays, they have distinctive characteristics:

Storytelling: Emphasizes recounting a specific experience or event in a structured narrative form.

Engagement through Story: Aims to engage the reader through a compelling story with characters, plot, and a central theme or message.

Reflective: Often includes reflection on the significance of the experience and the lessons learned.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s viewpoint, expressing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Focuses on developing a storyline with a clear beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Character Development: Includes descriptions of characters, their interactions, emotions, and growth.

Central Message: Conveys a central message, moral, or insight derived from the experience.

Personal Essay:

Exploration of Ideas or Themes: Explores personal ideas, opinions, or reflections on a particular topic or subject.

Expression of Thoughts and Opinions: Expresses the writer’s thoughts, feelings, and perspectives on a specific subject matter.

Reflection and Introspection: Often involves self-reflection and introspection on personal experiences, beliefs, or values.

Varied Structure and Content: Can encompass various forms, including memoirs, personal anecdotes, or reflections on life experiences.

Flexibility in Structure: Allows for diverse structures and forms based on the writer’s intent, which could be narrative-like or more reflective.

Theme-Centric Writing: Focuses on exploring a central theme or idea, with personal anecdotes or experiences supporting and illustrating the theme.

Expressive Language: Utilizes descriptive and expressive language to convey personal perspectives, emotions, and opinions.

Focus: Narrative essays primarily focus on storytelling through a structured narrative, while personal essays encompass a broader range of personal expression, which can include storytelling but isn’t limited to it.

Structure: Narrative essays have a more structured plot development with characters and a clear sequence of events, while personal essays might adopt various structures, focusing more on personal reflection, ideas, or themes.

Intent: While both involve personal experiences, narrative essays emphasize telling a story with a message or lesson learned, while personal essays aim to explore personal thoughts, feelings, or opinions on a broader range of topics or themes.

A narrative essay is more than just telling a story. It’s also meant to engage the reader, get them thinking, and leave a lasting impact. Whether it’s to amuse, motivate, teach, or reflect, these essays are a great way to communicate with your audience. This interesting narrative essay guide was all about letting you understand the narrative essay, its importance, and how can you write one.

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• > Narrative Science
• > What Is Narrative in Narrative Science? The Narrative Science Approach

Book contents

• Narrative Science
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• I Prologues
• 1 Narrative: A General-Purpose Technology for Science
• 2 What Is Narrative in Narrative Science? The Narrative Science Approach
• III Accessing Nature’s Narratives
• IV Interlude
• V Research Narratives
• VI Narrative Sensibility and Argument

2 - What Is Narrative in Narrative Science? The Narrative Science Approach

from I - Prologues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2022

• 2 What Is Narrative in Narrative Science? The Narrative Science Approach

In current English, the term ‘narrative’ covers a lot of conceptual ground – from an overarching position on some big issue, to all kinds of storytelling, to a general attention to language or metaphor. This chapter argues for narrowing our conception of ‘narrative’ to add value to scholarship in the history and philosophy of science (HPS). This narrower Narrative Science Approach treats narrative as a distinct and complex discursive form, subject to careful technical theorizing in its own right. By using analytical categories from narrative theory, we can identify in rigorous detail how scientific narratives are put together, what might distinguish them from other narrative forms, and the questions they raise for HPS and narrative enquiry. Similarly, when scientists use narrative ways of reasoning, tools from cognitive narratology enable us to reconstruct their imaginative activity. As a reciprocal movement, our Narrative Science Approach promises to enrich narrative studies.

2.1 Introduction: Narrative and the Narrative Science Approach

What do we mean by ‘narrative’ in enquiry into narrative science? How does the Narrative Science (NS) Approach relate to other scholarly interest in narrative? In everyday English, we most often encounter ‘narrative’ used to refer to an overarching position, or set of positions, on some issue – for example, there are competing ‘narratives’ of climate change, Footnote 1 while marketers for a brand develop its ‘narrative’ to appeal to particular consumers (see, e.g., Reference Salmon Salmon 2008 ). More basically, ‘narrative’ serves as a synonym for ‘story’. The two gather literature into their associative constellation, such that it could seem straightforward in 2010 for Laura Otis to claim a ‘close affinity’ between literary studies and work in the history (less so philosophy) of science, due to a ‘common focus on narrative’ ( Reference Otis Otis 2010 : 570). With the overlapping ‘linguistic’ and ‘narrative’ turns, historians have read scientific documents ‘like novels’ ( Reference Carroy Carroy 1991 : 22), Footnote 2 and sometimes joined literary scholars in tracing patterns of influence, shared elements or dissonances between scientific and fictional texts. These approaches have been enormously fruitful, but they disperse their analytic gaze over a wide and highly varied field of view. On the one hand, most studies in literature and science have tended to concentrate their attention on one or the other kind of text – usually novels, since most work in this domain is undertaken by literature scholars. Footnote 3 Much rarer are investigations which take full advantage of the potential for careful, detailed exploration of formal reciprocities and intersections between narrative fiction and scientific writing ( Reference Vila Vila 1998 and Reference Griffiths Griffiths 2016 are two examples). Footnote 4 On the other hand, when it comes to scientific texts, ‘narrative’ stands in too often for what is primarily an attention to language or metaphor , as in Reference Otis Otis’s 2010 reflections. When narrative appears in such broad terms, it loses its value as a distinct category of analysis. This chapter aims precisely to recover narrative as a discrete analytical category – of significance in its own right, and also as one mode of writing and thinking to be investigated alongside metaphor, themes, argument, genre, etc. in scientific texts and their literary counterparts. In promoting this ‘Narrative Science Approach’, I construe narrative in the specific technical terms of narratology .

Narrowing our perspective in this way has value, first, for understanding the histories and philosophies of science (HPS). As Kent Reference Puckett Puckett (2016 : 8) puts it, ‘looking at and naming different aspects of [narrative] gives us the ability to see what is weird about almost any narrative’. Narratology (or narrative theory ) Footnote 5 provides technical concepts and well-determined labels with which to discuss aspects of narrative; this chapter elucidates some fundamental narratological ideas for HPS scholars (my first set of readers) and demonstrates how these concepts help open up a peculiar set of features of scientific activity – ones we call ‘narrative’. Scientific texts are my priority, as they are in this volume and the wider NS Project; novels make few appearances in these pages. The formalized, technical framework of narrative theory lets us defamiliarize aspects of standard scientific texts like experimental research articles , but also to study how diagrams or computer-simulation movies function in story-like ways – I encompass all of these scientific outputs under the term ‘text’. Footnote 6 With tools from narratology, we can also point to imaginative processes undergirding certain forms of scientific reasoning . My analysis draws together the narratological work done in this volume and unpacks its workings, with the aim of promoting further use of rigorous narrative theory by scholars in HPS.

Such a NS Approach, secondly, has benefits for narratology more broadly, as well as for interdisciplinary research into literature and science. I thus also address this chapter to scholars in literary and narrative studies . (Indeed, bringing together a dual readership follows readily from my own interdisciplinary interests, and accords with the multidisciplinarity of the NS Project.) My analysis offers these readers an exploration of particular ways that narrative analysis plays out in historically and scientifically detailed enquiry. The contextual and technical expertise of historians and philosophers leads to perhaps surprising insights, which can, in a reciprocal movement, feed back into the work of narrative scholars. Studies of the kind in this volume provide much-needed, fine-grained analyses of non-fiction narratives in their particular historical and disciplinary contexts, for instance. Footnote 7 They also open up arenas for productive comparison of scientific and literary texts in strict formal terms. My argument, then, brings narratological endeavours – including the growing field of factual narrative – and HPS studies into dialogue, for the benefit of both areas of scholarship. Footnote 8

What the chapter is not, is a comprehensive introduction to narratological concepts – there exist many handbooks and critical introductions for that purpose. Footnote 9 Nor do I survey all the ways narratology could inform HPS scholarship. Rather, following Reference Wise Morgan and Wise (2017) , I concentrate on how scientists use narrative when doing science – as opposed to when they popularize it, or formulate an argument for a wider audience – and what narratological concepts enable us to see and say about such uses. Analyses from the NS Project serve as my principal examples; indeed, even where narratological concepts do not appear explicitly, they wind through many chapters in this volume, providing more or less implicit support to contributors’ arguments. My purpose here is thus twofold. In serving as an introduction to this volume, this chapter sets out how the NS Project thinks about narrative qua narrative. One might say the chapter ‘translates’ commonalities in contributors’ approaches into (some of) the terms of narrative theory. But, like all translations, mine is not neutral; this is my analysis of how narratological concepts provide an angle of entry into this collection. At the same time, the chapter stands on its own as a proposal for what narratology and HPS have to offer each other as fields of enquiry, and where that kind of dialogue might lead. My argument both complements and sits as counterpoint to Mary Morgan’s introduction ( Chapter 1 ) – quite deliberately; each of us offers ways of looking at this collection of essays and at wider scholarly themes that intersect them. We just do not take quite the same angle of vision. Commentaries by Sharon Crasnow and Norton Wise do similar kinds of work at the mid- and end-points of this volume ( Chapters 11 and 22 ).

Use of narrative spans the sciences – mathematical, natural, human and social – as Morgan outlines in detail in Chapter 1 . For the purposes of this introduction, I identify two major classes of narrative knowing, each of which is particularly susceptible to investigation using a particular kind of narratological tool. In the first place, there is the ‘ mise en mots scientifique ’ (after Reference Acquier Acquier 2010 ), or the ‘ mise en récit ’ (putting into narrative): the (re)presentation of scientific activities or findings in textual form, be that written, visual or spoken. Such texts, as material expressions of scientific work, are at once a product of scientific activity (think of a research article) and an index to the active process of narrative-making. Seen as output, the substantive ‘ mise en récit ’ takes nominal (noun) form – as a narrative – and overlaps with what Morgan calls ‘narrative representations’. Activity, by contrast, is verbal; what I see as the active flip side of the same ‘ mise en récit ’ is Morgan’s ‘narrativizing’. But, where Morgan treats the two as separate but related functions of narrative in science, I argue that they are thoroughly, even necessarily, interdependent when seen through the lens of narrative theory. Noun and verb, narrative-as-made and narrative-making, are two sides of the same coin. Both lend themselves to analysis through the output form, the text. Concepts from classical narratology serve to unravel this doubled nature of scientific narratives, as well as to pull out ways in which the events/phenomena to be recounted might differ from the way they are represented – which plots are told, from whose perspective, whether there are flashbacks. Such questions ultimately relate back to the fundamental distinction in narrative theory between story and discourse ; this distinction, and what it reveals about scientific activity, is the subject of section 2.3 of this chapter.

Before undertaking this work of unpacking, however, it is worth asking where scientific narratives – as output, noun, representation – sit in relation to the kinds of texts usually studied by narrative scholars. This question is the subject of section 2.2 . Until recent interest in ‘factual narratology’ (see Reference Fludernik, Fludernik and Ryan Fludernik and Ryan 2020 ), and even now, narratological categories have predominantly been applied to literary texts, which are readily accepted as being narrative in nature. The NS Approach, by contrast, does not formulate an a priori definition of what counts as a scientific narrative before asking whether we can productively employ narratological tools to unpack (some of) its functions. Footnote 10 Rather, contributors to the NS Project have examined both scientific narratives in the uncontroversial sense (like medical anecdotes or psychological case histories ), and also (and more frequently) portions or characteristics of texts that might more readily be called ‘reports’, ‘accounts’ or just ‘articles’. Footnote 11 (Indeed, the French term I have been using, ‘ récit ’, encompasses both forms.) The broad features of scientific narratives that I develop in section 2.2 , using Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan’s (2007) elements of narrativity, thus emerge a posteriori from the NS Approach.

This definitionally flexible approach becomes especially evident in my second class of narrative knowing in science. Similar to Morgan’s notion of ‘narrative reasoning’ ( Chapter 1 ), I construe this form of knowing as something that a scientist does with a scientific text. Each of us places the emphasis on a different word in the pair, however. Reasoning is privileged by Morgan under her functional approach as something scientists do with and within narrative representations – a deliberate cognitive process, distinct from imagining or affective reactions. By contrast, I understand ‘narrative reasoning’ as cognitively broader, involving imagination, affect and reason, in variable combinations. What matters for me is the combined result of these cognitive processes: story -like representations constructed in the mind/imagination of scientist–readers as they undertake some scientific activity (reading mathematical proofs, interpreting diagrams, framing their field). Footnote 12 The attention here is on the reader’s reception of a scientific document, and how it might share cognitive features with the reading of (literary) narratives, without presuming that the document is itself a narrative (representation). Ideas from cognitive, or post-classical , narratology are notably helpful for examining reader responses; I discuss these in section 2.4 .

Importantly, this interest in narrative modes of reasoning does not mean the NS Approach makes any broad claims about narrative as a mode of human cognition; even less do we claim epistemic priority for narrative knowing. For all our definitional flexibility, we therefore set aside the perspectives of thinkers like Paul Ricœur (e.g., Reference Ricœur Ricœur 1980 ) or Jerome Bruner, for whom narrative fundamentally structures one or more functions of human thought (see Reference Crossley, Herman, Jahn and Ryan Crossley 2010 ). Asking how narrative modes might enter into human cognition in general is a valuable question; it is just not one that we find particularly helpful in the context of this project. As David Herman presciently remarked in a Reference Herman 1998 commentary, claiming primacy for narrative is to set up an ‘idyll of narrative’ ( Reference Herman 1998 : 385), which essentially only reverses the epistemic hierarchy present in earlier philosophers’ ‘myth of science as univocal rationality’ ( Reference Herman Herman 1998 : 384). Footnote 13 Either hierarchization precludes fine-grained attention to the contextual nuances of science and narrative studies as historically evolving activities.

It is the evolution and intricacies of scientific activity which concern us in this volume; concomitantly, we do not take account of the historicity of narrative theory as a field of study. Rather, we make flexible use of a range of concepts from narratology and use them to interrogate the doing of science in its active sense: what in science is about narrating, constructing narratives, reading narratives? The narratological tools we employ, the places we find narrative, thus expand and contract with the contingencies of our case studies, and tend to draw from varied perspectives within narratology as a field of enquiry. Footnote 14 I reflect in my concluding remarks on what it might mean to look for narrative knowing in a historicized science of narratology .

2.2 Narrativity of Scientific Narratives

When asked, ‘what is a narrative?’, common usage, like some cognitive-science perspectives ( Reference Crossley, Herman, Jahn and Ryan Crossley 2010 ), holds that humans are innately able to recognize story -like configurations. Morgan , in Chapter 1 , circumscribes the domain of scientific narrative along functional lines – what it does for scientists alongside or in place of tables, models, diagrams and so on. For their part, narrative scholars have long striven to develop a precise and logically coherent definition of narrative. Footnote 15 But NS contributors rarely begin with these kind of definitions, or even ask explicitly, ‘is it a narrative?’, about the documents or actions they propose to analyse. Footnote 16 Rather, as illustrated in this volume, contributors find it more immediately significant to plunge into examining a given document’s (or action’s) narrative characteristics and how those function. Footnote 17 This notably allows attention to the fragmentary or lumpy ways that narratives can appear in scientific work, which might be overlooked under too stringent an initial categorization. Footnote 18 Andrew Hopkins ( Chapter 4 ), for instance, identifies sentence-level narrative chunks in geological research articles. These highly condensed narratives recount the transformations undergone by a rock formation, but are chiefly only recognizable as narrative by trained geologists . The narrative lies between the textual lines of the document, Footnote 19 so to speak, a point which emerges secondarily from Hopkins’s study.

In this section, I explore several characteristics of scientific narratives that can be identified through NS enquiry, taking narratologists’ definitional frameworks and theories as a sensible starting-point. Such comparison is additionally essential to developing a genuine dialogue between narrative theory and science studies . My preference is for Marie-Laure Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan’s (2007 : esp. 28–31) manner of classifying narratives according to a ‘fuzzy set’ of conditions on their narrativity . Footnote 20 Ryan lucidly divides the degree of narrativity of a given text into a number of ‘dimensions’ and ‘conditions’ that span narratologists’ instincts and preoccupations regarding what narrative is. By using her scheme, we evaluate the degree of narrativity shown by a given document, not whether it should be ruled out (or in) as a narrative. Here, I work with three of Ryan’s conditions in order to interrogate some salient features of scientific narratives: whether characters in a story are individuals with a ‘mental life’; the importance of the ‘temporal dimension’; and the issue of narrative ‘closure ’. Footnote 21 My discussion, drawing iteratively on chapters in this volume, opens up a few intriguing narratological features of scientific narratives – which may, in turn, inform further categorization work on narrative.

2.2.1 Narrative Protagonists

One of Ryan ’s conditions on narrativity that resonates with everyday experience and literary studies is the requirement for narratives to contain some ‘intelligent agents’, with mental or emotional responses ( Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan 2007 : 29). That is, a text has lower narrativity if it lacks this kind of ‘mental dimension’. Hopkins ’s mini rock-narratives are one example; rock formations as agents have no mental reactions. What is immediately evident from the NS Project, therefore, is the need for a capacious approach to characters in scientific documents, because otherwise many texts would be ruled out of consideration as narratives. Scientific narratives very often recount transformations undergone by protagonists (main characters) that are neither human nor necessarily anthropomorphized: in this volume, the Stac Fada Member (Hopkins, Chapter 4 ), the Tohoku earthquake (Miyake, Chapter 5 ), organic molecules (Paskins, Chapter 13 ) and substances in the fruit fly (Meunier, Chapter 12 ). Footnote 22 The first two examples involve narratives about particular individualized protagonists; there is only one Stac Fada Member – a spatially localized rock formation – only one spatially and temporally circumscribed earth rupture process that was the Tohoku earthquake. Hopkins and Miyake do each nonetheless unpack ways that these particularized narratives inform or are informed by generalized knowledge in their fields. On the other hand, organic molecules and biological substances are already less individuated, more generic , narrative agents; even though the fruit fly narratives distinguish between particular substances (e.g., cn + or v + ), all the instances of cn + are held to be identical (indistinguishable) and to behave in a uniform manner across all fruit flies. When cn + is the protagonist in a fruit fly narrative, therefore, it stands in for a class of identical cn + substances, to be distinguished only from other generic character-substances (such as v + ).

Robert Meunier ( Chapter 12 ) characterizes the narratives scientists tell about such entities as ‘narratives of nature ’; they relate what ‘happen[s] […] when no researcher is intervening or even watching’. As narratives of nature are abstracted, and become part of the acquired knowledge in a scientific discipline, the phenomena they relate also tend necessarily to become stabilized. Their narrativity correspondingly decreases, according to Ryan ’s schema; at the abstract, generic limit, narratives of nature tell of (what have come to be seen as) habitual physical events, undergone by generic protagonists without a mental life. Footnote 23 As such, these narratives tend archetypally to fulfil conditions of factuality (or posited factuality) in a given scientific field. Footnote 24

By contrast, mentally reacting protagonists act in particular situations in Meunier’s other category of narratives: scientists’ ‘research narratives ’. Here, scientists appear as characters performing specific actions (like steps in an experiment), and their reasoning processes or emotional reactions are often revealed through focalized narration. Footnote 25 Ryan’s condition about ‘mental life’ in narrativity thus plays usefully into the distinction between Meunier’s two categories of scientific narratives. For again, the scientist–protagonist may either be individualized – like Charles Darwin (see Chapter 7 ) – or generic , standing in for all scientists in a field (see Chapter 12 ).

Examining Meunier’s categories in detail can provide insight into the way a given scientific activity functions. The prevalence of a research narrative in an experimental research article helps familiarize its reader with a new approach, especially when, as Meunier demonstrates, the scientist–protagonist becomes generic, allowing the reader to imagine herself in that place. Alternatively, that both categories of narrative are intrinsically bound together in archaeological dating practices is fundamental for Anne Teather’s ( Chapter 6 ) proposal for archaeology to become more reflexive about how research questions influence the narratives it tells about the past. Across studies from the NS Project, we mostly see that, as a field of enquiry develops, its research narratives, with their individual actors and dimension of mental life, yield place to the telling of narratives of nature . This has even led contemporary chemists to call for ‘thin ’ narratives of nature, like chemical reaction schemes, to be ‘thickened’ by reinsertion of the research story (Paskins , Chapter 13 ). Where the two categories of narrative are less distinct is in precisely those sciences which study the human, such as anthropology or psychology. Early psychological case histories , for example, weave together narration focalized on the mental processes of both individual subject and individual scientist–observer ( Reference 56Hajek Hajek 2020 ). Footnote 26 Can (or should) we distinguish the interplay of ‘research narratives’ and ‘narratives of nature’ as psychologists start to worry about the effect of their acts and thoughts on their subjects of study?

2.2.2 Time in Scientific Narratives

For the vast majority of narrative scholars, it is an essential condition of narrativity that a text deal with events that progress in time; an account of events occurring in a single moment could not be a narrative, for instance, nor could a series of instructions. This is largely taken for granted, such that questions of time in (especially classical) narratology are chiefly a matter of differences between the story and discourse in the ordering or duration of events. Footnote 27 Many scientific narratives similarly have what we might call a ‘fundamental linearity’ Footnote 28 – a straightforward, and highly significant, temporal structure – particularly those of the so-called historical sciences (geology, evolutionary biology). Footnote 29 Other work in the NS Project, however, has opened up the question of the relative importance of time sequencing, in comparison with other kinds of ordering that make meaning in a narrative. Mary Morgan’s ( Chapter 1 ; Reference Morgan Morgan 2017 ) notion of colligation privileges relations between disparate items brought together by virtue of a single framing, which may then be woven into nets of similarities and differences; here, orderings other than time are the ‘grid’ by which narratives structure their meaning. Both Morgan ( Chapter 1 ) and the recent work of Carrier and colleagues mark a clear separation between such ‘configurational or coherentist’ narratives ( Reference Carrier, Mertens and Reinhardt Carrier, Mertens and Reinhardt 2021 : 20) and their time-ordered counterparts. Certainly, the two make sense of their subject matter in different ways – according to different ‘grids’, to use Morgan’s terms. Yet the gulf between them is precisely about differences in function , rather than in narrativity , and we should not assume that ‘configurationa l’ scientific narratives are not also situated in time . It is simply that the time dimension is more or less implicit in the length and order of their ‘events’, as we can see from examining how ‘configurational’ narratives are structured and are transposable.

Chemical reaction schemes provide one example of a scientific narrative that is structured by principles other than time. Each of the diagrams in Paskins ’s chapter ( Chapter 13 ) proposes to answer the puzzle of how the molecule tropinone might be synthesized from a combination of other organic molecules. The structural formulae on the diagram are ordered under a causal logic and selected according to whether they show key stages in the transformation of the starting molecules (such as proton transfer or a rearrangement of chemical bonds). If this causal ordering is also implicitly a sequence in time, the duration of each step (between the arrows) is subordinate to consideration of which transformations take place, and which chemical substances are added to or removed from the reaction vessel (see, e.g., notations above and below the arrows). Footnote 30 Transformations, not duration, are what matters for chemists. These configurations are also of principal import for NS scholars in analysing the function of the reaction scheme as a narrative. What I want to stress is that a progression in time still underlies this kind of narrative, if only in an implicit or latent form. We can see this in two different ways.

First, the reaction scheme is a thin ‘narrative of nature’ , Paskins argues, in the sense that the actions of chemist-researchers have been flattened onto the plane of the molecules. If we ‘thicken’ the narrative by reintroducing elements of the research narrative , time re-enters the account explicitly as both ordering and duration, such as in the gloss provided by Pierre Laszlo : ‘let this mixture return to room temperature (rt) over four hours’ (quoted in Paskins, Chapter 13 ). By virtue of involving human agents, a research narrative will always have some basis in time – human actions are performed in time – and, as Meunier ( Chapter 12 ) demonstrates, narratives of nature are often distilled out of accounts that begin by mixing human interventions and objects’ reactions.

The above logic relies on re-inserting a human actor (or at least a living agent) into the narrative; it is an external logic of time-relatedness, if you will. My second proposal for understanding ‘configurational ’ narratives as situated in time proceeds by invoking an internal transposition of the narrative. Footnote 31 I like to think of this as similar to parameterizing the narrative in time, borrowing a term from my training as a physicist . Parameterizing is what mathematicians or physicists do when they take the movement of an object in space, like a ball thrown in an arc, and instead of writing equations showing how its vertical movement relates to its horizontal position, they break both down into how they rely on time. Time order and duration thus become explicit in the latter form, where time is only implicit in the former set of equations (vertical vs horizontal position) – the physicist chooses between them depending on what she wants to examine. Similarly, physical chemists might take a chemical reaction – expressed in the transformation-based (non-temporal) logic of the reaction scheme – and create a simulation that steps in time through the process by which molecules come together, exchange protons or create different bonds (as in Reference Wise Wise 2017 ). In other words, they might transpose the ‘configurational’ narrative into explicitly temporal steps – for instance to investigate which parts of a reaction occur most rapidly. Footnote 32 An analogous transposition is described by seminal French narratologist Gérard Reference Genette Genette (1972 : 78) when he compares the temporal extension of an oral narrative – the time taken to tell the story – to that of a written narrative: the written text has an extension in space (words on a page), which we can conceive metonymically as an extension in time, in terms of the time it would take to read the text. Footnote 33 Moreover, in any number of literary texts studied routinely by narrative scholars, there is a greater symbolic or semantic significance to other linkages than the temporal ( Reference Schmid, Hühn, Meister, Pier and Schmid Schmid 2013 ). Some scientific narratives have just as low a degree of narrativity – measured along the time dimension – as many of their literary counterparts studied by narratologists, and the inverse. My point, again, is that both narrative scholars and historians and philosophers can (and do) pose more fertile questions than definitional points about time-situatedness. Chapters in this volume demonstrate other, richer analyses of time in scientific narratives: whether chronologies take a relative or absolute basis (Teather, Chapter 6 ), or the narrative implications of adopting a periodic temporal structure (Huss, Chapter 3 ).

2.2.3 Narrative Closure and Narrative Levels

The final element in my discussion of narrativity in scientific narratives is the question of closure , which falls under Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan’s (2007 : 29) ‘formal and pragmatic dimension’ of narrativity. Narrative closure is a matter of a reader’s reception of a text on a cognitive or affective level, and is usually held to occur when a reader’s expectations of the story are met, or their questions answered ( Reference Klauk, Köppe and Weskott Klauk, Köppe and Weskott 2016 ). To the extent that scientists report completed research actions or propose answers to puzzles, scientific narratives tend to be constructed explicitly as closed (or alternatively as unambiguously open – when a puzzle remains unsolved). When twentieth-century palaeobiologists proposed to account for extinction events in the fossil record (Huss, Chapter 3 ), their narrative of how such mass extinctions are caused by periodic extraterrestrial events comes in itself to a closed ending: it answers the puzzle question of how and why extinctions occurred.

If the periodic narrative itself, along with most scientific narratives, achieves closure in the basic sense of providing an answer, the concept remains worthy of note in narrative science for pointing to the imbrication of several narrative levels in scientific knowledge-making. Narrative closure is perhaps always a matter of multiple levels, as an individual reader’s affective ‘sense of an ending’ is informed by that reader’s cultural expectations (see Reference Klauk, Köppe and Weskott Klauk, Köppe and Weskott 2016 ). In the case of scientific narratives, this multi-level nature of closure is additionally linked to the nature of the scientific enterprise, under which knowledge must be validated by the scholarly community. John Huss ( Chapter 3 ) teases out these intertwined narratives with regard to the periodic extinction story. It was not sufficient for the palaeobiologists to propose this new periodic narrative as explanation; while it offered a closed answer to their question, the palaeobiologists were also impelled to search for evidence to support its claims.

On the individual level, we can consider this search as palaeobiologists’ striving to reach an affective sense of properly ‘scientific’ completeness, in accordance with prevailing scholarly virtues and community standards for knowledge: the extraterrestrial story had to be ‘filled in’ with a certain level of artefactual evidence, however plausibly it accounted for mass extinctions. The palaeobiologists’ search for evidence also arguably constituted a pursuit of narrative closure on the level of the story of their discipline. Footnote 34 Joseph Reference Rouse Rouse (1990) terms this level one of narratives ‘in construction’, in the sense that actors in a field of enquiry conceive of its past and future trajectory in narrative terms, and subscribe to a shared view that knowledge proceeds by seeking evidence for hypotheses and remaining open to revising past accounts. Footnote 35 Scientific activity, then, interweaves this shared, always open-ended narrative (of science, of a discipline) with the various closed and coherent narratives developed by scientists about their objects of study; it comprises ‘an ongoing tension between narrative coherence and its threatened unravelling’, in Rouse’s terms ( Reference Rouse 1990 : 183). Footnote 36 Examining the narrative condition of closure thus brings into prominence the necessary interweaving of the social in scientific activity (through narratives of a field, or expectations about epistemic virtues) and particular scientific narrative-making by scientists. What remains to be elucidated is quite what might demarcate closure of a scientific narrative in the proper sense, linked as it is to scientists’ affective responses, from the more general tenets of scientific enquiry as it develops through time. For it is far from clear that we should follow Rouse in considering all scientific activity as a narrative in progress – that would be to turn away from our narrower conception of narrative in the NS Approach. Exploring the affective dimension of scientific narratives – why, for instance, some seem more ‘elegant’ or appealing – indeed comprises a vital next step in the study of narrative science. Elspeth Jajdelska’s contribution to this collection ( Chapter 18 ) makes a start, and points the way towards the kind of collaboration between cognitive science, narrative scholarship and HPS that is needed for careful work on these borders between the formal, the affective and the social.

2.3 Formal Matters

2.3.1 story/discourse.

Thus far, I have been using the rather unwieldy term ‘narrative’ – as noun, as adjective – in relation to conditions on narrativity . One of the fundamental tenets of narratology , however, provides us with the possibility of bypassing the multivalent ‘narrative’ (especially as we use it in English), and delineating different levels of narrative as at once both act and representation. Narratologists conceive narrative as a dynamic relation between a story – the events which are recounted – and a discourse – the way those events are recounted. Footnote 37 Faced with a given narrative, we only have immediate access to the discourse, that is, to the text of the document. Let us assume that we have a fixed set of events to relate, such as the sequence of actions needed to isolate a biochemical substance. Footnote 38 We could represent those events in discourse in many different ways. For example, the story of how to synthesize tropinone could be written as a chemical reaction scheme or written in words; it might include essentially no information about the chemist’s actions, or it might add in those actions and their historical context; it could pass quickly over certain steps and linger when telling others. The distinction Paskins draws ( Chapter 13 ) between thin and thick chemical narratives therefore also emerges out of considering how much information, and of what kind, is contained in different discursive versions of a single chemical synthesis story. Footnote 39 Using terms from narrative theory adds rigour to such investigations, because we can precisely label different domains of narrative structure.

To dissect a scientific narrative into story and discourse also draws our attention to potential mismatches in the order and duration of events recounted, which in turn means we can unpack the temporal dynamics of the narrative in detail. Many scholars have noted, for instance, that scientists do not necessarily recount experiments in the same order in which they performed them in the lab (see Meunier , Chapter 12 ). Footnote 40 Narrative theorists like Gérard Reference Genette Genette (1972) have given us not only the story–discourse pair ( histoire–récit , for Genette), but also a precise, neutral terminology for designating different temporal orderings and durations. Footnote 41 As yet, detailed analysis of the temporal workings of scientific documents remains another area to be filled in by further NS studies: for example, how might differing order and pacing (between story and discourse) be used to persuade readers, generate suspense or achieve closure? Here, I develop only several possible strands of this temporal analysis.

We know from the work of scholars like Reference Genette Genette (1972 : esp. 78–80) that it is rare in literature for the ordering of events in the story to coincide directly with that of events as recounted in discourse. Fairy tales are perhaps one exception ( Reference Puckett Puckett 2016 : 184–185). In science, short narratives of nature also tend to have the ordering of story and discourse coincide – look at examples quoted at the beginning of Meunier ’s and Miyake’s chapters (Chapters 12 and 5 ). More intriguing is the kind of temporal dynamic required cognitively and epistemically by historical sciences like evolutionary biology . Sharon Crasnow groups these kinds of scientific endeavours under the framework of ‘process tracing ’ in her Interlude ( Chapter 11 ) and elucidates their shared reliance on forms of evidence that intermix time and causality. These are phenomena best construed by following the effect of certain causal factors through time, through a process; what does this entail for the relative temporality of their story and discourse?

Let us take John Beatty’s example ( Chapter 20 ) of the evolution of flatfish . The narrative constructed by a biologist to explain this evolution might begin with the observation that flatfish have their eyes offset on their heads – that is, the discourse begins with an observation, which is the end event of the story of how flatfish came to have the features they do. (For the investigating biologist, it is likely a middle-term event.) The discourse would then usually jump backwards to the selected starting point of the evolutionary story – i.e., a moment when flatfish swam upright and had eyes located symmetrically on their head. Footnote 42 But, after this initial jump, for a biologist to provide a properly Darwinian account of the flatfish’s evolution , they must ensure that the story unfolds each of the incremental steps in time order, leading from the fish’s initial form to its form with offset eyes (Beatty , Chapter 20 ). Such a story is narrative worthy , according to Reference Beatty Beatty (also Reference Beatty 2016 ) precisely because of its contingency. Potential evolutionary ‘branches-not-taken’ might appear implicitly, embedded in the narrative, Footnote 43 but there would not be the kind of jumps backwards (or forward) in time to new sets of events that we see in a novel like Frankenstein , or a classic Freudian psychoanalytic case. Footnote 44 The discourse also compresses millions of years of incremental changes (in story time) into a narrative tellable in human timescales.

The epistemic conditions on such a (Darwinian) historical account require a careful temporal unfolding on the level of the story of evolution; by implication, we would expect this to be reflected in the discourse . That is, we would expect the coincidence in timing between story and reasoning about the fish’s evolution to mean events must follow in sequence when scientists put such a story into narrative (the discourse), such that the crucial time-ordering of events could be conveyed to the reader . Curiously, analogous examples in this volume suggest that this is not the case. Hopkins ( Chapter 4 ) demonstrates that geologists write very few narrative discourses into their research articles about temporally unfolding geological transformations. Similarly, political scientists trace along processual pathways to examine, for example, whether the United States would have entered the Iraq War even had G. W. Bush not been elected president – yet their publications do not recount those processes in order from beginning to end. Footnote 45 Such a choice not to have scientific discourse recount events in their story order seems surprising. To use a frequent analogy between narratives in historical sciences and classic detective stories, it is as though Holmes never unveiled his solution to Watson, but left the reconstruction of steps in the murder to the reader. For now, I can only raise the question; it must be left to further narratological investigation to ascertain the dynamics of ordering and duration in such scientific narratives.

2.3.2 Narration and Focalization

Beyond a careful attention to relative timings, classic narratology also directs us to interrogate whose perspective is expressed and with what authority, at each of the story and discourse levels. It is here that we can most clearly mark the ways narrative – especially in extended, verbal format – is a complex, formal edifice, however ‘natural’ it might often appear. Footnote 46 Narrative theorists differentiate first between the author of a work and its narrator : the author (e.g., Mary Shelley) writes down (or draws, etc.) the narrative, while the narrator tells the story (e.g., Victor Frankenstein). Although author and narrator are often presumed to be one and the same in non-fictional (‘factual ’) narratives, Robert Meunier ( Chapter 12 ) argues cogently that we should consider them as separate entities, especially for multi-authored scientific texts. Having posited that distinction, what interests me here are the narrators , the tellers from whose point of view we receive some narrative element: whether they appear as a character in the story, and how directly they reveal their perspective. In a pure narrative of nature , for instance, the narrator tells the story, but is not a character in it; the perspective is an external one, and appears impersonal, as in the quotation which opens Chapter 5 . Historians of science will be used to contrasting such an impersonal narrator with the strong, self-fashioned narrative voice typical of eighteenth-century natural science (e.g., Reference Terrall Terrall 2017 ). Such an early natural-scientist narrator is also a character in his story, and often relates his actions and emotional responses in the first person. Footnote 47 But there are more than these two options present in scientific narratives, and that is precisely where using narratological tools reveals complexities we might not otherwise grasp.

We notably encounter more than one internal perspective in accounts from the human sciences , when the aim is to gain access to a human subject’s mental, cognitive or emotional state. Footnote 48 Such interior views can be accessed and portrayed in a variety of different ways. In the following extract, from an experiment involving hypnotic suggestion , there is a shift in the focus of the narrative – it begins with the narrator –experimenters’ point of view, Footnote 49 then shifts subtly to that of the hypnotized subject.

We take another coat and we pass it to M. F…, who puts it on; the subject, who gazes fixedly at this coat with a wondering look, sees it wave about in the air and take the form of a person. ‘It is, she says, like a mannequin with nothing inside it.’

The hypnotic suggestion in question is that Monsieur F. will be invisible to the subject. As the extract begins, we see the narrator also present as character(s) in the story , performing actions with the coat, and then observing the subject’s reaction. This reaction first consists of external features of the subject – her ‘wondering look’ – described from the narrator’s perspective, before the text moves to portray what the subject sees, and then relate the subject’s words about her vision. Throughout, the telling is done by the narrator–experimenters; they refer to the subject in the third person. But the narrative also relates information to which, logically, the narrator–experimenters do not have access, in the form of the subject’s interior view; there is a shift in who ‘sits behind’ the words of the text, with the narrator–experimenters and the subject ‘doubling up’ for this part. This is an example of shifting narrative focalization . Footnote 51

What I want to emphasize are the kinds of questions we can ask after noticing such a shift (or, more often, repeated shifts) in focalization in a narrative. On the one hand, the subject’s perspective is stamped here with the authority of the narrator as (a pair of) scientists. The description of what the subject sees is an interpretation, based on or validated by the subject’s words (which are also reported). On the other hand, noticing the shift in perspective – and that it occurs before the subject speaks – draws our attention, as readers , to the representational surface of the text – to the fact that it is a presentation of the story , and that there might be others. There is notably a small temporal mismatch here, since the narrator–experimenters’ interpretation, which occurs first in the discourse , must logically follow the subject’s speech on the level of the story . We are reminded that the immediacy of this experimental report is constructed, that writing occurred after the activity of the experiment. Did, therefore, the subject say exactly what is reported, or are the words (also) a reconstruction by the narrator–experimenters to validate their interpretation? More fundamentally, when did knowledge-making occur here – during actions, or during writing, or both? I would stress that it cannot be fixed down; narrative, (even) in its textual form, is not only an output of scientific activity, but fully and necessarily participates in the activity of knowledge-making. This is narrative as ‘the expansion of a verb’ ( Reference Genette Genette 1972 : 75), or the binding together of ‘narrativizing’ and ‘narrative representation’, in Morgan ’s terms ( Chapter 1 ).

If, in a sense, this brings us back to the kind of arguments well known in history of science under the label of ‘constructivism’ (e.g., Reference Golinski Golinski 2005 ), it does so from the distinct perspective of narrative. Formal narrative analysis can do more than signal that knowledge emerges from putting scientific activity into words. It can suggest different patterns of authority in narratives from sciences which study humans, compared to those which do not. My brief analysis above, for instance, points to the ways that shifting narrative focalization seems essential to the business of the human sciences around the turn of the twentieth century, but also to a concomitant trade-off in the form of a more unstable textual authority. Further work could study how textual dynamics of this kind articulate with scientists’ avowed theoretical orientations; for example, do behaviourist psychologists, who eschew internalized observations, nonetheless produce focalized narratives? How do these dynamics compare with narrative focalization in accounts involving anthropomorphized (non-human) protagonists, on the one hand, or multiple interacting humans, on the other hand (as in social sciences like anthropology)? Curiously, there is narrative focalization on plant growth at multiple narrative levels in the Darwins ’ Power of Movement in Plants – not only when the Darwins narrate their story, but also when the plants themselves are (co-)narrators, as Devin Griffiths ’s narratological reading reveals ( Chapter 7 ). Footnote 52

2.3.3 Which Comes First?

Analysing shifts in narrator focalization prompted me to ask whether Binet and Féré’s subject spoke the exact words related, or whether the experimenters filled in a plausible comment while writing their text. In story -discourse terms, this is equivalent to asking whether Binet and Féré’s text – as discourse – reports a pre-existing story and just reorders the events, or, alternatively, whether portions of the story are only constructed (and re-constructable) through their inclusion in the discourse . As Kent Reference Puckett Puckett (2016 : 35) asks: ‘Do events precede their representation, or does a representation somehow produce events as significant and thus knowable?’ This ‘paradox’ ( Reference Puckett Puckett 2016 : 215) points to a central tension in narrative theory over which of story or discourse comes first; it has been a productive force structuring the work of key narrative theorists, as Puckett sees it. NS studies also provide a particularly rich site through which to trace the dynamics of this tension, with conclusions that can feed back into theoretical work on narrative.

I am not advancing some radical constructivist view here, as if there were no reality outside of that which is ‘ mise en récit ’ in a narrative. But, when it comes to scientific narratives, it is not always straightforward to identify what counts as story, as against the discourse, especially when we are dealing with non-human, non-anthropomorphized protagonists. Hence the richness of scientific narrative. Indeed, Meunier ( Chapter 12 ) enunciates how both discourse and story (as events and their ordering implied in discourse) can differ from the events that took place in the experimenter’s laboratory in ‘reality’, or the ‘practice-world’, as Meunier terms it – and this even for actions performed by and recorded by humans. When an archaeologist finds many Neolithic stone axes at some site, these can, on the one hand, serve as evidence or markers of story events – through some absolute dating method, for instance. On the other hand, the archaeologist might construct a narrative about popular stone quarrying sites, which might frame the axe find as a trace in a story about demand for felling trees. Footnote 53 Either way, story and discourse sit in a dynamic relation within the activity of scientific narrative-making .

The interplay of story and discourse is particularly clear in those scientific endeavours where narrative is not an end point, but where discourse-making and story-reconstruction occur iteratively. Footnote 54 In this volume, Teru Miyake ’s study ( Chapter 5 ) of seismological work on the Tohoku earthquake is a salient example. Miyake’s seismologists first take evidence from a single kind of sensor and configure it computationally into a time-stepped narrative simulation of how events in the earthquake occurred: the rupture narrative . Many rupture narratives are generated (e.g., from different types of sensors), and then compared by seismologists, who next extract details which are present in several rupture narratives; these details are treated as story-level events. Finally, ‘these distilled details are strung together into a model-independent rupture narrative, which [Miyake] call[s] an integrating narrative ’ . In narratological terms, successive steps in this scientific work take each of story and discourse, respectively, as pre-existing. Rupture narratives are first configured from story points (i.e., the sensor data evidence), before a switch in perspective, which construes the discourse of the rupture narrative as a source from which to reconstruct and extract a different set of story elements (Miyake ’s ‘distilled details’). The final step flips perspective yet again, back to the work of constructing a narrative discourse (the integrating narrative) from (the new set of) pre-selected story details. Reference Morgan Morgan (2017 ; and this volume) speaks of ‘narrative inference’ as unravelling and reknotting sets of evidential or conceptual elements.

If these iterative steps are clearly separated in Miyake’s account, we could speculate that such dynamic work of narrative configuration and reconfiguration is in play in scientific activity more widely, especially where phenomena are not directly observable. For instance, Elizabeth Haines ( Chapter 9 ) points to a doubled way of working within visual narratives, when she shows how ‘neither evidence collection nor explanatory accounts were prior’ in Hugh Hamshaw Thomas’s botanical and intelligence-gathering practices . Opening out from this NS work, we might ask further whether scientific narrative-making (and re-making) of this kind could serve as a useful model for broader processes of narrative-writing and narrative-reading .

2.4 Narrative Reasoning

For now, I turn to existing narratological understandings of reading practice and how they can illuminate scientific reasoning. No telling is without its implied or actual readers, and they too perform important work in narrative-making, in an interplay with the narrative as textual or visual material. In a sense, therefore, I move now from considering narrative as the dynamic relation between story and discourse , to considering an interconnecting relation between discourse/narration and reader . It is a move which brings us into the domain of cognitive narratology – a field that combines findings from psychology and artificial intelligence to explore relations between story-text and -language , on the one hand, and human memory , perception and affect , on the other. Footnote 55 Concepts from cognitive narratology are well suited to tracing the kinds of processes occurring in a reader’s mind (or imagination ) as they read a scientific text or diagram ; notably, narratological concepts point us towards elements of scientific reading practices that might well be compared to ways people read fictional texts.

I construe such cognitive processes under the banner of ‘narrative reasoning ’: they comprise story -like imaginative constructions which scientific readers generate when reading a research article or examining visual evidence. Footnote 56 If the scientific text in question has a clear narrative discursive form, narrative reasoning in the mind may not differ greatly from the logic of the narrative on the page, or it might be inferred using more classical narratological tools (of the kind discussed in the previous section ). Footnote 57 Narrative reasoning is more distinctive as a component in scientific activity when story-like imaginative work is prompted by apparently non-narrative scientific texts – texts with very low narrativity (to link back to my earlier discussion). An example I have already evoked is the ‘implicit’ or ‘covert’ narratives of historical sciences like geology, which Hopkins argues only unfold as narratives to an informed reader. To interrogate narrative reasoning under my NS Approach is to examine the processes by which a scientist imaginatively replays such narratives, and, importantly, how these processes map onto particular textual elements. This explicitly adds a textual dimension to the narrative thought processes opened up by Morgan ( Chapter 1 ) . We might refer to tacit knowledge , scientists’ trained judgement , or their horizon of expectations – to invoke some concepts current in HPS and narrative studies. However important, these are not enough for rigorous narrative enquiry, since they operate on a more general level: they relate texts as a whole to broad-scale expectations or knowledge in a field. With the NS Approach, we can delve into the specifics of which particular elements in a research paper or diagram activate story-like imaginative responses, as opposed to other cognitive functions. Notions like narrative performativity and scripts allow contributors to this volume to begin this work. Footnote 58 I briefly outline their findings in what follows.

As Elspeth Jajdelska emphasizes in Chapter 18 , the question of who narrates a story and in what circumstances matters for its reception. Jajdelska transfers the notion of narrative performativity from the spoken to the written domain and, in a recursive move, elucidates its workings in a research article about cognitive science. Performative language is what early narratologists might have called properly literary language , in that it draws attention precisely to its aesthetic qualities. It thus bears a greater affective force and implicitly cues a certain imaginative worldview. The worldview thus rendered can encode assumptions or perspectives which support a researcher’s explicit argumentative position, as in the article analysed by Jajdelska. Importantly, under this framework, particular textual passages, or even a few words, can be identified as corresponding to a story-like cognitive effect – one which plays a highly significant role in the knowledge claims of this scientific article.

A different kind of small-scale textual (or visual) element that produces story -like reading is the script ( Reference Herman Herman 1997 ). In her chapter examining how mathematicians read proofs, Line Andersen deploys this concept from early cognitive narratology to argue that mathematicians read proofs similarly to how people read fictional narratives. That is, portions of the proof call up a sequence of events or actions that are expected or appropriate in the context in question. These proof-segments operate, in other words, like the scripts in literary texts for events such as ‘eating in a restaurant, riding a bus, watching and playing a football game, participating in a birthday party, and so on’. As the AI researchers who developed the notion go on to say, ‘These scripts are responsible for filling in the obvious information that has been left out of a story. Of course, it is obvious only to those understanders who actually know and can use the script’ ( Reference Schank and Abelson Schank and Abelson 1977 : 41). Footnote 59 Andersen develops the correspondences between script-activating elements of a proof and steps in mathematical understanding. Like readers of novels, the mathematical reader performs the mental action of running through steps cued by a script, but since scripts deal with expected sequences of actions, the reader’s attention is particularly caught when a proof deviates from the expected background of mathematical scripts. By undertaking such narrative reasoning , mathematicians are prompted to focus on the novel, likely crucial, elements of a proof. Reciprocally, HPS analysts like Andersen can identify more precisely which elements count as most significant in mathematical reasoning and understanding, and for which kind of readers, since script-activation depends on a reader’s level of understanding of an expected situation. Notions such as scripts, narrative performativity and other ideas from cognitive narratology could similarly be applied to many domains studied by HPS scholars. Wise, for instance, broadens the notion of script to several areas of scientific knowing in his Finale to this collection ( Chapter 22 ). But where such an approach might bear most fruit is in combined textual and ethnographic analysis, of the kind sketched by Andersen – specific elements of a scientific text can be connected to particular narrative-like reasoning, and that mapping contrasted with scientists’ own accounts, as well as analysts’ reconstructions, of scientific activity.

2.5 Conclusion

Narrative theory is an extensive and complex field and, in this chapter, I have only worked through some of its key concerns and ideas as they apply to scientific narratives. My aim in doing so has been twofold. On the one hand, I have sought to encourage HPS scholars to treat narrative in the focused, technical terms of narratology, by demonstrating the analytical productivity this promotes. Such analysis – as undertaken in the NS Project and chapters in this volume – reveals that a ‘ mise en récit ’ always involves an active component of knowledge-making or reasoning , even when a narrative (representation) is also the output of some scientific endeavour. Reciprocally, if narrative in science is always active, it is not an activity divorced from any concrete, material basis; a major part of the value of narratological tools is that they can serve to trace precise connections between narrative as text and narrative as mode of reasoning . What the NS Approach provides, then, is precision and rigour to an object of study – narrative – that otherwise risks overflowing its conceptual bounds to such an extent as to offer no meaningful basis for comparison or interpretation. NS offers exciting perspectives as an approach deployed alongside the usual epistemic resources of HPS.

On the other hand, this chapter elucidates the various ways in which work in the NS Project is informed by concepts from narratology, even where such concepts are not emphasized or delineated. As historians and philosophers of science, contributors to this volume bring a sensitivity to the theoretical and contextual constellations in which their case studies can be situated. Our studies thus bring a depth of detail to explorations of narrative in a non-literary domain – they can complement and complete narratologists’ investigations in this area with much-needed science-specific expertise. Just as I hope future HPS work will be open to narratological perspectives, I similarly encourage narrative scholars to draw upon HPS expertise, as showcased in this volume, in developing their field beyond the literary. This chapter has notably pointed to some distinctive characteristics of scientific narratives – their frequent non-human, even generic, protagonists; their iterations of story -making and discourse -configuration – as well as proposing that there is less of a divide between scientific and literary narratives than often assumed, when it comes to their situatedness in time – it is just that different questions of timing might arise. And, of course, there remain many areas of enquiry where collaboration between HPS and narrative studies would be fruitful: the affective charge of scientific narratives, forms of narrative focalization and the particular interplay of ordering and duration in work in the historical sciences, to mention just some I have signalled above.

But to conclude this chapter I would like to turn briefly to the ambitions held by narratology to be considered a science, from its pre-history in Russian formalism to its more recent cognitive turn. Footnote 60 Could we apply the NS Approach to narratology itself? As Reference Puckett Puckett (2016) stresses, narratology as a domain of enquiry is not without its own history. Where he historicizes it in terms of key political and intellectual currents, we might ask how narratology is informed by other scientific fields and what role narrative-making plays in its endeavours. If we had to classify narratology, we could place it in the category of the human or social sciences , as taking a human product – narrative – and its cultural and social imbrications, as its object of study. We might then sketch a shift in perspective from a view of narratology influenced by the model of chemistry – with stories dissected into a fixed set of re-combinable elements – to one that enacts something of a convergence with cognitive science and some branches of psychology . Early structuralist Algirdas Greimas ( Reference Greimas 1983 : 65), for instance, praised the language of chemistry as ‘a semiotic form which must, across all kinds of language, serve to express its meaning’, Footnote 61 while to read Manfred Jahn’s encyclopaedia entry ( Reference Jahn, Herman, Jahn and Ryan 2010 ) on cognitive narratology is to be plunged into considerations of ‘preference rules and processing strategies’ that would not appear out of place in a research article in computational science. By analogy with chapters in this volume, we might speculate that early structuralist narratology mobilizes ‘thin narratives’ of the kind identified by Paskins ( Chapter 13 ) , or that recent cognitive theories enlist strategies of ‘narrative performativity’ to provide imaginative support for their claims (as in the article investigated by Jajdelska in Chapter 18 ). What might such a transition imply for understanding the evolution or limits of narratology as a ‘historically specific logic’, to use Puckett’s terms ( Reference Puckett 2016 )? When we apply a notion like the script to a scientific narrative, to what extent do we invoke distinctively narratological theorizing, as against ideas from the script’s origins in AI? Or, is to pose such questions to descend into a methodological spiral, where narrative and science turn circularly around each other? Footnote 62

1 This is narrative in its noun form, unlike in French, for instance, where narratif exists only as an adjective. Cf. Elisa Vecchione’s talk in the NS Public Seminar Series, 9 October 2018 ( www.narrative-science.org/events-narrative-science-project-public-seminar-series.html ).

2 Already in 1885, naturalist Jules Claretie – who aimed to contribute to science – had a character in one of his novels read scientific research on hypnotism ‘as I would read a novel’ (see Reference Hajek Hajek 2016b ).

3 Reference Buckland Buckland’s (2013) Novel Science is just one example, from an English literature scholar linked to the NS Project. Jacqueline Reference Carroy Carroy’s (1991) work stands for a primarily historical approach ( www.narrative-science.org/events-narrative-science-project-publicseminar-series.html ).

4 Caroline Reference Levine Levine’s (2015) Forms calls for comparative investigation of forms across disciplines.

5 I use the two terms interchangeably, although like in all academic disciplines, individual scholars frame their disciplinary allegiance in different ways.

6 This follows standard usage in literary and cultural studies.

7 Monika Reference Fludernik, Fludernik and Ryan Fludernik (2020 : 63) calls for such finer examination.

8 In this, I also respond to Reference Herman Herman’s (1998 : 383) contention that ‘what is needed is a more dialectical approach to the science-narrative nexus’.

9 Some examples are Reference Herman, Jahn and Ryan Herman, Jahn and Ryan (2010) ; Reference Culler Culler (2011) ; Reference Puckett Puckett (2016) ; Reference Hühn, Meister, Pier and Schmid Hühn et al. (2014) ; Reference Crossley, Herman, Jahn and Ryan Fludernik and Ryan (2020) .

10 This contrasts with the focus on questions of fact, validity , authenticity etc. often present in analyses of ‘factual narratives’ (see science-related articles in Reference Fludernik, Fludernik and Ryan Fludernik and Ryan 2020 ).

11 The range of scientific documents examined under the NS Approach is showcased in Anthology I and Anthology II.

12 Although I refer in this chapter to ‘readers’ (of written texts), many of the arguments developed could also be extended to ‘listeners ’.

13 See Olmos ( Chapter 21 ), for a detailed dissection of such philosophical claims.

14 I thus construe our flexibility as a strength, against Reference Herman Herman’s (1998 : esp. 381) implicit desire for definitional clarity.

15 For a nuanced account of narratology’s historical development, see Reference Puckett Puckett (2016) . Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan (2007) gives a useful overview of more recent definitional stances.

16 As per Marie-Laure Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan’s (2007) perspective on definitions.

17 Meunier ( Chapter 12 ) and Berry ( Chapter 16 ) each develop more explicit definitions of narrative.

18 See Morgan ( Chapter 1 ) for ways that small narrative chunks in scientific texts relate to other cognitive elements of those texts.

19 This is the cognitive narratologist s’ criticism of definitions that restrict narrative to being a text-type, rather than (also) a cognitive style (e.g., Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan 2007 : 27–28).

20 Norton Wise , in contrast, draws heavily upon notions of experientiality in his commentary ( Chapter 22 ), as he explores narrative as a style of thinking in scientific activity.

21 Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan’s (2007 : 29) four dimensions comprise the spatial, temporal, mental, and formal and pragmatic. I set aside her ‘spatial dimension’ and examine one condition from each of the last three dimensions.

22 The plant narrators discussed by Griffiths ( Chapter 7 ) occupy an intermediate space, partly anthropomorphized through their interactions with (and explicit framing by) the Darwin family. For anthropomorphized accounts in eighteenth-century natural science, see Reference Terrall Terrall (2017) .

23 Very many contributions to the NS Project examine narratives of regular phenomena, even when those are anthropomorphized; in Reference Beatty Beatty’s (2016 ) terms, the regular is narrative worthy for science through its consequences for knowledge.

24 As ‘stories of the facts’, narratives of nature would seem an ideal subject for those invested in questions of factual narratology – provided they are not first ruled out as narratives (cf. Reference Fludernik, Fludernik and Ryan Fludernik and Ryan 2020 ).

25 For HPS readers, I will explain focalization in section 2.3 . Reference Milne, Fludernik and Ryan Milne (2020 : 449–51) builds on some earlier work of the NS Project ( Reference Wise Morgan and Wise 2017 ) to distinguish between narratives with scientist-protagonists and those involving anthropomorphized objects of study.

26 As, necessarily, do most psychoanalytic studies, into the twenty-first century (see Reference Scheidt, Stukenbrock, Fludernik and Ryan Scheidt and Stukenbrock 2020 ).

27 I return to these questions of narrative order in section 2.3 .

28 I thank Martina King for this term.

29 See, especially, chapters by Hopkins ( Chapter 4 ) and Griffiths ( Chapter 7 ).

30 Sequence or order ( ordre ) is distinguished from duration ( durée ) in narratologist Gérard Genette’s treatment of narrative temporality.

31 This second form is thus more broadly applicable.

32 The situation examined by Reference Wise Wise (2017 ) is more complex than this because it is solving a different kind of puzzle, one involving quantum-level interactions. An inverse transposition (time to space) occurs in some of the spatial diagrams of the Tohoku earthquake (see Miyake , Chapter 5 ). Kranke ( Chapter 10 ) also elucidates the ways phylogenetic tree diagrams can be constructed to emphasize time-progression through evolution , or, alternatively, to draw out relationships between species.

33 The distinction here is in terms of the ‘ temps du récit ’. This notion is especially crucial when it comes to comparing the ‘duration’ ( durée ) of events in the story and in the discourse (or written narrative) ( Reference Genette Genette 1972 : 122–124).

34 Other levels can sit intermediate between these two, as Hopkins details ( Chapter 4 ): alongside particular accounts of the formation of the Stac Fada Member , and a sense of progress in their field, geologists invoke broad (uniformitarian ) narratives about the earth.

35 See also Reference Borelli, Fludernik and Ryan Borelli (2020 : 435). We might also apply this notion to the narratives that synthetic biologists construct of their field, or that mathematicians employ to explain different programming architectures (see Berry, Chapter 16 , and Dick , Chapter 15 , respectively).

36 See also Reference Levine Levine’s (2015 : 40–42) account of narrative closure in novels as nonetheless ‘organiz[ing] relationships into the future’. Both Rouse’s and Levine’s analyses have explicit political aims. Meunier ( Chapter 12 ) examines precisely the way experimental research articles both close one research episode and open onto new questions for the field.

37 Story and discourse are the most common terms, though some narratologists employ other labels.

38 For example, a substance in the fruit fly (Meunier, Chapter 12 ), or glycogen as isolated by Claude Bernard (see Hajek’s case in Anthology II ).

39 See also Kranke ( Chapter 10 ) on different representations of a single ‘underlying’ phylogenetic tree diagram .

40 Meunier’s analysis is more complex than my discussion of his chapter here, as he introduces a third domain into the narratological framework, and distinguishes the ‘practice-world ’ from the story and the discourse.

41 I will introduce some of Genette’s terms in notes and asides here, without presenting a complete overview of his scheme.

42 In Genette’ s terms, this jump is an ‘analepsis’. Although I concentrate on ordering in time here, duration is equally as important in Genette’s narrative theory.

43 See Reference Ryan Ryan (1986) on ‘embedded narratives’ .

44 I’m thinking here particularly of the case of Anna O … (actually written by Breuer), which has been subject to much scholarly analysis of the timing of events (see, for example, Reference Skues Skues 2006 ).

45 This point emerged during Crasnow ’s contribution to the NS Public Seminar Series ( www.narrative-science.org/events-narrative-science-project-public-seminar-series.html ). See also the importance of interview ‘data’ for the El Salvador civil war case (Crasnow, Chapter 11 ).

46 Here I complicate Wise ’s ( Chapter 22 ) opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘natural’ language as a framework for envisaging narrative science, and his implicit privileging of ‘narratives of nature’ as the instantiation of scientific narrative.

47 In Genette’s terms, the first narrator is both heterodiegetic (not a character) and extradiegetic (external perspective), while the second is homodiegetic and intradiegetic ( Reference Genette Genette 1972 : chaps. 4–5).

48 Thinking back to Reference Ryan and Herman Ryan’s (2007) conditions of narrativity , we have a ‘mental dimension’ here for both scientist (narrator/character) and subject (character).

49 For this limited analysis, I set aside the complexities of the plural nature of the narrator and treat it as a single entity encompassing two experimenters.

50 My translation. I analyse this passage in greater detail in Reference Hajek Hajek (2016a) .

51 With shifting focalization also comes narrative polyphony , a multi-vocality present in the background to Bhattacharyya ’s paper ( Chapter 8 ). Scientific polyphony was also the topic of a NS workshop, 3 June 2019 ( www.narrative-science.org/events-narrative-science-project-workshops.html ).

52 Griffiths further explores the implications and constraints of such non-human co-narration on genre and on narrative level (see Chapter 7 , esp. Table 7.1 ).

53 These examples are loosely adapted from Anne Teather’s paper ( Chapter 6 ).

54 As noted previously, what I understand as necessarily interdependent, Morgan separates into functions of ‘narrativizing’ (to make the representation), ‘narrative reasoning’ (thinking from a narrative – closest to my discourse-making), and ‘narrative explanation’ (thinking within a narrative – like my story-reconstruction).

55 See Reference Herman Herman (1997) and Reference Jahn, Herman, Jahn and Ryan Jahn (2010) for overviews.

56 This differs from Morgan’s use of ‘narrative reasoning’ to describe reasoning from or within (pre-existing) narrative representations ( Chapter 1 ).

57 Meunier draws precisely these kind of interpretations in Chapter 12 . See also Reference Ryan Ryan (1986) .

58 Nina Kranke ( Chapter 10 ) also connects elements of scientific documents – in her case, visual diagrams – to the narratives that readers construct from them, though without using particular narratological ideas.

59 I thank Line Andersen for drawing my attention to this quotation. Morgan also signals the communal aspect of scientific narrative in Chapter 1 .

60 The term ‘narratology’ dates from 1969, when it was coined by Tzvetan Todorov ( Reference Puckett Puckett 2016 : 234 Footnote n. 23 ).

61 I thank Mat Paskins for suggesting this quotation.

62 Many thanks to Mary Morgan, Mat Paskins, Martina King, Devin Griffiths and John P. Hajek for insightful comments and suggestions on drafts of this chapter. Working with the Narrative Science core team – Mary, Dominic, Andrew, Mat, Robert – over the last few years has been a stimulating and enriching experience, for which I thank you all. Finally, I am ever grateful to Gordon P. Jardine for promoting my interest in language, narrative and their surprising turns; I dedicate this chapter to his memory. Narrative Science book: This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 694732). www.narrative-science.org/ .

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• What Is Narrative in Narrative Science? The Narrative Science Approach
• By Kim M. Hajek
• Edited by Mary S. Morgan , London School of Economics and Political Science , Kim M. Hajek , London School of Economics and Political Science , Dominic J. Berry , London School of Economics and Political Science
• Book: Narrative Science
• Online publication: 16 September 2022
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009004329.003

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Home / Essay Samples / Science

Scientific Essay Examples

Science is the systematic investigation of the surrounding world through observation and experiments and the process of formulating judgments and hypotheses based on obtained evidence. Given that science can be directed at virtually any question that humans find relevant, so can be an essay on science – starting from questions in natural sciences and ending with social sciences.

Science is always relevant because it is the practice through which virtually any new knowledge is gained and any innovation is achieved. Another reason for its relevance is because nowadays, the scientific consensus is often ignored by many people and even national authorities. Below you can find several scientific essay examples to review – note the topics, structure, information delivery style, language.

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Exploring "My Side of the Mountain": a Journey into Wilderness and Self-discovery

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