Elements of Narrative: The 5P's
A Structural Approach to Reading and Writing Narrative: People, Plot, Place, Point, Perspective (also known as "Character, Plot, Setting, Theme, Style" or the "Who, What, When, Where, Why, How")
This teacher-created overview of the elements of narrative makes it ideal for teaching students how to identify each of the five elements a writer has chosen to use for a given work, whether fiction or nonfiction. Each of the readings has a quiz and an activity (aka “test”) to demonstrate they have mastered the content of this handout. Then there is a worksheet for them to use to determine the elements used in the specific work, and then to write an essay about a key aspect they found. (Yes, there is an Elements of Essays handout, too.)
David Freitag was an excellent English teacher at Grant High School in Portland, Oregon. Journalism teachers in Portland Public Schools typically teach English classes, too, and the Grant journalism teacher shared this with me. The 5 P’s are a mnemonic that make them easy to remember.
As far as we know, this is a craft piece created by Mr. Freitag. It was modified further (we added the 5 W’s and H) by the Grant journalism teacher and I as we saw useful applications in non-fiction narrative journalism.
It is the best single classroom instructional tool I’ve found for teaching narrative literature to freshmen in high school English. (I also learned the best place to recruit talent for the high school newspaper was in my Freshman English classes.)
As a journalism teacher (newspaper every two weeks, advertising, sales, news, features, sports, opinion, cartoons, photos, page design, typesetting, distribution) one or two beginning journalism classes, and English, there wasn’t always time to do anything, and this allowed me to introduce the basic elements, show them how to do it, and set them on the path to success in writing a great paper. In addition, I learned to put students into table groups to discuss and help each other. When they had questions from their group, they would call me over to help them through it.
I tell you that to establish that time was precious — and if someone had already created something like this, I would use it instead. As you will see, I eventually created additional “Elements of …” that were genre-centered, and eventually began using that approach, with great success, particularly at-risk or catching-up learners. When I couldn’t find anything, I wrote it myself. You will see Paul Reuben’s piece which I found on his server in the early days of the web. When I contacted him to share how I had used it, he was delighted. I will eventually post what I have.
We usually start with shorter stories and novels for practice. Short stories usually just focus on one of the five elements, while longer narratives have the time to develop all of the Five P’s. Each work uses only a limited selection of what is in the Elements of Narrative, so students learn to be detectives.
(And when students are learning to write an essay about a work, they learn a thesis must not be a fact but an argument that can be defended with details from the text. Eventually, that led to portfolios and personal self-assessments of their work … but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
I am most interested in finding out from teachers and parents how much “explaining” I should do. (I have found most students have little patience for it, and it’s better for them to get started in table groups.) I would prefer to have you post your thoughts and questions here.
These “Elements of …” are available to teachers and parents to use with their students. You may use the documents as a PDF, or you may revise and share them as you wish. They have worked well for many different types of learners. The originals are in Microsoft Word format which I can’t attach as a document in Substack, and a lot of the formatting was lost when I tried pasting it into Substack as text, so I’d rather attach it this way.
Comments, questions, below.
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