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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."

"We're coming upon our  65th installment of "Why's this so good?" - in which notable journalists dissect their favorite pieces of narrative journalism. Our contributors have included Adam Hochschild, Jennifer B. McDonald, Eli Sanders, Megan Garber, Wesley Morris, Ann Friedman, Chris Jones and Ben Yagoda, and covered Joan Didion, Calvin Trillin, Michael Paterniti, Nora Ephron, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Roy Blount Jr., David Foster Wallace, Michael Lewis and dozens more. The series has highlighted classics of print, plus a little public radio, and we've got other narrative forms scheduled. Here are excerpts of the top five most popular pieces so far:"

Short non-fiction pieces

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

"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.""

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.

"Welcome to Storyboard's first annual year-end roundup of top storytelling: 34 of our favorite pieces in audio, magazines, newspapers and online, "

"Modern Love is a series of weekly reader-submitted essays that explore the joys and tribulations of love. Each week, an actor also reads one of the essays in a podcast. Though the stories are often about romantic love, they also take on love of family, friends, and even pets. This teacher finds their themes universal and the range of essays engaging models to help her students find their own voices."

"Serial senior producer Julie Snyder described the project as an "arty" and "novelistic" seven-part series about a man who despises the Alabama town he's lived in his whole life and decides to do something about it. The press release circulated this morning offered further narrative clues: Production of S-Town began when a man reached out to This American Life bitterly complaining about his small Alabama town. He wanted a reporter to investigate the son of a wealthy family who had allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. Brian agreed to look into it. But then someone else ended up dead, and another story began to unfold - about a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure and the mysteries of one man's life."

"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

A contest sponsored by the National Writing Project that focuses on narrative voice. It provides resources for developing voice.

"The magazine story behind Sebastian Junger's celebrated nonfiction book A Perfect Storm ran in Outside magazine in October 1994. "The Storm" (4,765 words) told the story of the Andrea Gail, a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass., that sank amid horrific weather, killing everyone aboard. It's a harrowing narrative, and particularly remarkable for being - by virtue of nature and fate - a write-around. Storyboard's questions and comments for Junger are in red; Junger's answers - which he kindly offered by phone - are in blue."

" five articles that use photography and narrative to reveal the texture of teenage life; next, 11 articles about young people making a splash in the world; and, finally, three news articles about teenage life that we think might provoke interesting classroom discussions. Let us know what you think and how we could make this feature more useful for your classroom. The next installment will be published on July 11."

"Project Ed is a platform dedicated to educational video made for and by 21st century learners. The core of Project Ed is an open, community-driven approach to content. We start by identifying K-12 concepts where a video has the potential to create a meaningful impact.Then we design contests to take these lessons out of the classroom and put them in the hands of digital storytellers. Each contest starts with a "creative brief," that includes everything needed to achieve a specific learning goal. Once the brief is launched on Projected.com, creators from all over craft original narratives to teach in unforgettable ways. Each brief generates hundreds of new ideas and a multitude of submissions. This process brings together the rigor of curriculum experts and the passion of creators to build an open library of effective, engaging lessons."

"I've used the story of Rudolph as a "mentor text" ever since. At 88 words, Rudolph is shorter than the Jesus parables and the Lincoln speeches, works often praised for their brevity and high purpose. In the digital age, writers need reminders that memorable stories can be told in short forms. I now believe that there may be no more efficient example for teaching the elements of story than Rudolph. I use it to discuss the naming of characters, the telling detail, the inciting incident, the narrative arc, the story engine, the mythic archetype and the big payoff."

Given the recent rise in podcast popularity, it's no surprise that audio narratives are making their way into the classroom. They offer an engaging way for teachers to merge project-based learning with digital media analysis and production skills. That's why we're announcing our first-ever Student Podcast Contest, in which we invite students to submit original podcasts, five minutes long or less, inspired by one of our 1,000-plus writing prompts. The contest will run from April 26 to May 25, so stay tuned for our official contest announcement next week In anticipation of that contest, the mini-unit below walks students through the process of analyzing the techniques that make for good storytelling, interviewing and podcasting. The activities culminate in students producing their own original podcasts.

"Serial proved that true-crime podcasts could be global phenomena that rival even the most prestigious of prestige scripted television. But with S-Town, the new podcast from team Serial that launched today, the creators aren't taking their cues from HBO. Instead, they're borrowing a page from William Faulkner, hoping to re-invent the medium once again-this time as a sweeping, Southern Gothic novel. Hosted by This American Life producer Brian Reed, S-Town is the latest offering from Serial Productions, which includes Serial host Sarah Koenig and executive producer Julie Snyder. The seven-part podcast, released in its entirety today, follows Reed as he meets, and ultimately befriends, a fascinating man who claims to have knowledge of an unsolved murder in his rural Alabama town (which the man nicknames "Shittown"-hence the podcast's name). But what begins as a classic murder mystery quickly turns into something much deeper-a winding, intricate narrative of small town politics, family strife, and, as the S-Town team describes it, "the mysteries of one man's life.""

Nonfiction - essays and narratives from 2,500 to 7,00 words.

"Are you ever SO excited to tell your friends a story that you kind of jumble the whole thing up? Like the substance is there, but if the delivery is off it just doesn't LAND as well. The same thing goes for podcasting. Even if we can hear in your voice that you're excited about something, if there's no structure or narrative to the piece it can be hard to hook an audience. This week on The Students' Podcast, we're revisiting an episode from last season where we talk to some of our high school finalists who managed to tell their story really well."