For this essay assignment, our peers had to come up with our own food narrative story that involves food, some conflict in between and lastly, a resolution or to sum it up what we learned and how this impacts us in our future. My narrative story called, “The Journey of Overcoming Fear,” was a narrative essay based on my experience with oysters and how this experience impacted my future ongoing life. In our class, we discussed the importance of purpose, audience, exigence, stance, and genre. The importance of purpose, audience… etc was meant to provide a better understanding of the course learning outcomes.  

The purpose of this essay was to give readers an understanding of my perspective on my conflicting situation and how I reacted to the idea of trying new foods/things. In order to convey my thoughts and opinions to my readers, I used techniques such as first-person narrative, and imagery. For instance, when I wanted to describe the vivid image of the oyster I had in my mind, I wanted the readers to know how strongly I felt about the oyster and how much it disgusted me. Although I used the two techniques, this essay was still not good enough. Thinking back, I feel like I should have included more details in describing the situation rather than just going along with it. For instance, I could’ve described how much I was sweating to the point where my hands would just wet the tissues or how red my face was because I felt like everyone was just pressuring me to try it.  

This narrative essay mostly connects to those who are big fans of stories and foods. I wanted to demonstrate to my readers how being able to try new foods is actually not a bad thing. I want my readers to understand that although it can be scary, it is also the best feeling after knowing how a certain food tastes like without having to assume or judge. In addition, there was the incorporation of how people’s opinions can also change the way you feel about certain food/things. By including the details of how my sister’s friend, Michelle approached me about trying new foods and the phrase, “You’ll never know unless you try.” 

My exigence in writing this narrative essay was to let readers know that everyone goes through hardships. Whether it was a small situation or a big situation. Whether or not it consisted of food or any other things. I just wanted to manifest to my readers that hardships also come with lessons, and by experiencing hardships these lessons become more apparent. However, I believe the example I set up in this narrative essay may not have fully convinced a reader to try new foods/things considering how my use of details was lacking.  

My stance on writing this narrative essay is basically my thesis statement, which was basically, “I hate seafood but then I grew to like it later on.” Looking back, I should have made my thesis statement clear in order for my audience to know the foundation behind my essay and where I was coming from. It was also hard for me to state a clear thesis statement because I was not sure how I could construct the thesis statement to flow with my essay accordingly. I ended up having the last sentence in my introduction as a base for what was going to happen later on.   

The genre of this essay assignment was a narrative essay. The definition of a narrative essay is basically a story that the narrator tells. It can be fiction or non-fiction and can also have different categories of the genre such as mystery, historic, science or romance. In this case, mine was a food narrative essay.  

After writing this reflective essay and my narrative essay, I learned a lot of ways on how I can improve my narrative writing. In addition, by analyzing my writing through the five rhetorical situations, I understand that a narrative essay is not the easiest to write. A good narrative essay reminds me of a goldmine. For example, the gold miners keep digging for gold and when they do find gold they become intrigued, and they stay longer to analyze it. Just like how a reader picks up a book and if it’s a good book, they keep it to read.