Our new Mentor Text series spotlights writing from The Times that students can learn from and emulate.

This entry, like several others we are publishing, focuses on an essay from The Times’s long-running Lives column to consider skills prized in narrative writing. We are starting with this genre to help support students participating in our 2019 Personal Narrative Essay Contest.

Overview

If most of your experience as a writer has been in a school context, you’re probably used to starting pieces with the kind of introduction that sets up what you’ll talk about — a kind of “In this essay I will...” But even in academic writing, there are more artful ways to pull your reader in. (And we’ll take those on in future editions of our Mentor Text series.)

A narrative, of course, seeks to tell a story from the first paragraph. Yet even in this genre, beginning writers often include too much of what some teachers call “throat-clearing” or “front porch” — introductory information that doesn’t add much, and that risks losing the reader’s attention.