Narrating is a basic strategy for representing action and events. As the term’s Latin root, gnarus (“knowing”), implies, narrating helps people make sense of events they are involved in, as well as events they observe or read about. From earliest childhood, we use narrating to help us reflect on what has happened, to explain what is happening, and to imagine what could happen.
Narrating serves many different purposes. It can be used to report on events, present information, illustrate abstract ideas, support arguments, explain procedures, and entertain with stories. This chapter begins by describing and illustrating five basic narrating strategies, it includes two types of process narrative—explanatory and instructional—and it concludes with some sentence strategies you might use to get started drafting a narrative.