Identification

"Identification" refers to the students' ability to identify narrative writing characteristics. Narrative writing can be boiled down to THREE MAIN SKILLS:

     1. Description

     2. Action (or pacing)

     3. Dialogue

I use these three basic skills and refer to them by the acronym D.A.D. Certainly, there are other skills that are important - character reflection, point of view, and utilization of higher-level skills like flashback - but these three main skills are usually sufficient to help students improve their narrative writing. Most students neglect description and dialogue in their narratives, and an intentional focus on these elements is often enough to drastically change their writing.

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To do this, let's look at a story. I have my students read 7  or 8 short stories as we begin the narrative unit. They maintain a padlet (padlet.com) and keep track of narrative characteristics as they read. 

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Video of "The Reef" by Samuel Scoville Jr. and use of Padlet.com.

https://www.loom.com/share/e2f5729136fa4ca98987a1770b144c65 

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      Student examples of padlets:

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