The document provides guidance on refining composition skills, particularly in narrative writing and vocabulary building. It emphasizes the importance of guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words from context and organizing narrative paragraphs chronologically to achieve coherence. Additionally, it discusses the use of adverbial expressions and adverb clauses to clarify time relationships in writing.

1. The Narrative Paragraph
Prof. Mara Luna
ENGL 3103
To be used with: Refining Composition Skills, 6th ed. by R.
Smalley, M. Ruetten, and J. Rishel-Kozyrev

2. Building Vocabulary:
Guessing Meaning from Content
You will be a more efficient reader if you do
not look up every unfamiliar word in your
dictionary.
Instead, try to guess the meaning of the
word from the context, the word and
sentences surrounding the unknown word.
Your guess does not have to be perfectly
accurate as long as it is close enough to
allow you to understand the passage.

3. Building Vocabulary:
Guessing Meaning from Content
For example:
“My father has played a cruel joke on Mom
by assigning her an American name that
her tongue won’t allow her to say”.
You can guess that a cruel joke is not a
very nice one.

4. Present Narration
Although narration usually refers to the
telling of a story, here it describes the
relating of an experience
That experience may be a typical
experience, an experience that is going on
now (for which present narration is
appropriate), or one that occurred in the
past (for which past narration is used).

5. Narrative Paragraphs
Usually organize events chronologically,
moving from what happened first to what
happened last.
Ordering your sentences and ideas
chronologically is not hard.
However, it can be difficult to make your
paragraph unified – in other words, to
decide what to include and what to omit
and to select the controlling idea for your
paragraph.

6. Past Narration
The narration that takes place in the past is
as common – if not more so – than the one
that tales place in the past.
You have to arrange your sentences
logically and include only the sentences
that relate to the topic.

7. Adverbial Expressions of
Time and Sequence
It is important in narrative writing to show
the reader the time relationships between
sentences and ideas; it helps to achieve
coherence.
The adverbial expressions of time and
sequence help to tie the sentences
together logically, thus clarifying the time
sequence.

8. Adverb Clauses of Time
Are a more sophisticated technique for
achieving coherence.
Some examples are:
 by nine o’clock
 at around ten o’clock
 first
next