The Structure of Narrative

Narrative of a Request for a Restraining Order

This exercise asks students to make recommendations for improving a poorly constructed restraining order. An easy task, this is a good confidence-builder for students and trains them to be critical about lack of detail while also teaching the principles of an effective narrative.

Choosing a format. The first time I gave this assignment, students were uncertain about how to present their critique. I told them that determining the best method of presentation was part of the assignment. The task then became a question of how to communicate to someone tips for a better method of communication. This forced the students to see how big a gap there can be between their thoughts and the forms that they take in writing.

Some students rewrote the narrative with additional, invented information and directed parenthetical asides to the fictional client. Others excerpted pieces of the narrative and followed each clip with questions and comments for the fictional client. Thus, a lesson-within-the-lesson can involve comparing different approaches to the solution.

Discovering ambiguity. In general, students have little trouble spotting the vagueness and the temporal disorder. The ambiguities require a little more subtlety to discern. It can be worth discovering as a class the phrases that lend themselves to more than one interpretation. How many glasses were thrown? Does the last sentence reflect the wife's feeling or the writer's?

Importantly, reassure the students that there is no "true reading" to unravel. They are free either to pick a meaning and elucidate it or challenge the fictional client to see and fix the ambiguities.