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A high school student annotates her award winning personal narrative: "Maria Fernanda Benavides, a winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest, tells us how she hooks readers by dropping them into a scene."

"Varya Kluev, a NJ high school student and winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest, tells us why metaphor is her "go-to tool" whenever she wants to add flair to her writing."

"Adam Bernard Sanders, a high school student and winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest, tells us why he likes to keep his conclusions "purposefully open-ended.""

"We asked students to write about a meaningful life experience. Here are the eight winning essays, as well as runners-up and honorable mentions."

Op-Docs is The New York Times editorial department's forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with wide creative latitude and a range of artistic styles, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.   Op-Docs videos are produced by both renowned and emerging filmmakers who express their views in the first person, through their subjects or more subtly through an artistic approach to a topic. Each is accompanied by a director's statement. In December 2012, we started a new Op-Docs feature: Scenes. This is a platform for very short work - snippets of street life, brief observations and interviews, clips from experimental and artistic nonfiction videos - that follow less traditional documentary narrative conventions.

"Language merely reflects our way of trying to make sense of the world. - Frank Smith Frank Smith (1982) says 'writing touches every part of our lives'. One of the first reasons we write is because it is a tool for communication in culture. It gives us the ability the share information over time and space with multiple individuals (explaining, recounting & opinion). It can also be used as a permanent record or as a statement e.g. in history, geography  & science genres. The third cultural aspect for writing is artistry (narrative and poetry). Finally, there is also the personal aspect to writing. Writing allows us all to reflect, express our perceptions of self, to socially dream or to be critical (memoir). By writing, we find out what we know; what we think. Ultimately though, writing is a means for us to express ourselves in the world, make sense of the world or impose ourselves upon it. The question now is why do children write at school? For these purposes? - Not often. There is a massive discrepancy between the writing done in the real-world and that of the classroom. Donald Graves says 'all children want to write'. It is just a case of allowing them to write about the things they are interested in. As Frank Smith says, 'all children can write if they can speak it.' If they can talk about it, they can write it down. The transmission of narrow decontextualized writing skills; that English is just a formal system to be learnt. The insistence on task-orientated writing. The insistence on teacher-chosen writing tasks. The insistence on the use of external stimulus (literature units, film-clips, topic-writing) at the expense of children's knowledge, interests, loves, talents and idiosyncrasies. The formal rather than functional teaching of grammar. These examples embody the 'commonsense' assumptions which claim an authority which is supposedly natural and unshakable. Writing in classrooms at present isn't seen by children as important

"There are all kinds of narrators-going way beyond simple first or third person. Here's a little study of the different types."

"We are trying out a new feature. Call it writing practice (with a nod to Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones," where I first encountered the term). Or virtual workshopping.  Or maybe simply shop class. The goal is to break down the work that goes into creating stories, and offer prompts or small suggestions to help you practice that work. The assignment: to see beyond first sight. To sit long enough in one place to get past surface impressions and personal projections, and try to see what more lie before them. To draw on their other senses: sound, smell, taste, touch. Finally to see even beyond those physical senses to memory, metaphor, history and emotion. In other words, to see the possibility of stories. To notice, question, wonder - and write it all down."

"Zoe Roben, an English teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in Manhattan and enthusiastic Moth listener, wanted students at her small public high school to have a more sophisticated understanding of how to tell personal stories. So in the fall, she invited Moth educators to Harvest Collegiate to carry out an afterschool workshop with nine kids, while she acted as the teacher liaison. For eight weeks, the students and adult supervisors brainstormed and practiced telling their stories, and at the end delivered their tales before the school and again at a Moth office, where they were recorded. The theme was courage. Students told stories about kitchen disasters, lost hamsters and minor acts of adolescent agitation, like chopping off hair. Anxious at first about their ability to perform, students came to embrace the experience, Roben said. "They were glowing at the end, with the feeling that they could get up in front of an audience and do something this big," she said. "It was knowing they had something to say, and experiencing their own voice as something valuable," she added."