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Creative Nonfiction
Quarter 1 – Module 1
Literary Conventions that Govern the Different Genre

Department of Education ● Republic of the Philippines

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Creative Nonfiction
Alternative Delivery Mode
Quarter 1 – Module 1: Literary Conventions that Govern the Different Genre
First Edition, 2020

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Published by the Department of Education – Region X – Northern Mindanao.

Development Team of the Module

Writers: Marilou D. Bienes

EL M. Dela Cruz, Ph.D.
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Mala Epra B. Magnaong, Chief ES, CLMD

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Creative Nonfiction
Quarter 1 – Module 1
Literary Conventions that Govern the Different Genre

This instructional material was collaboratively developed and

reviewed by educators from public and private schools, colleges, and/or
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email their feedback, comments, and recommendations to the Department of
Education at [email protected].

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Department of Education ● Republic of the Philippines

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page No.
OVERVIEW
What I Need To Know 1
What Should I Expect 1
Things to Remember To Get Through 2

Lesson 1- Academic Text Structures

What I Need To Know 3
What I Know 4
What's New 5
What Is It 6
What's More 8
What I Can Do 10
Post Assessment 12
What I Have Learned 14

Lesson 2 - Language Use In Academic Writing

What I Need To Know 15
What's In 15
What I Know 16
What's New 17
What Is It 17
What's More 20
What I Can Do 20
Post Assessment 21
What I Have Learned 23

Lesson 3 -Academic Reading Strategies

What I Need To Know 24
What's In 24
What I Know 25
What's New 26
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 What Is It 26
What's More 28
What I Have Learned 29
What I Can Do 29
Post Assessment 30

Lesson 4 - Various Techniques in Summarizing a Variety of Academic Texts

What I Need To Know 32
What I Know 32
What Is It 33
What's New 33
What's More 34
Post Assessment 45
What I Have Learned 48

Lesson 5 - Thesis Statement of an Academic Text

What I Need To Know 49
What I Know 49
What Is It 50
Post Assessment 53
Additional Activities 55

Lesson 6 – Outlining
What I Need To Know 55
What I Know 56
What Is It 57
What's More 61
Additional Activities 62
Post Assessment 63
What I Have Learned 66

References 67

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 This module in Creative nonfiction aims to enhance your communication skills
specially in designing the development of your Abilities I utilizing appropriate
language from various discipline using correct structures.
This module has six parts or lessons:
Lesson 1: Deals about analysis on theme and techniques used in a particular
text
Lesson 2: Create samples of the Literary Elements Based on One’s
Experience Lesson 3: Analyze Factual Non fictional Elements (plot,
Characters, characterization, point of view, Angle, Setting and
Atmosphere, Symbol and Symbolism, Irony, Figures of Speech, Dialogue,
Scene, other elements and devices in Text) Lesson
4: Write a draft of a short piece (Fiction and Non-Fiction) using any of the
literary conventions of genre following these points:
• Choosing a topic
• Formulating a Thesis Statement
• Organizing and Developing Ideas
• Using any literary conventions of a given and chosen literary element
• Ensuring that theme and techniques are effectively developed Lesson
5: Evaluate other’s draft based on:
• Clarity if idea
• Appropriate choice of literary element
• Appropriate use of the element
• Effective combination of the idea and the chosen literary element
Lesson 6: Revise the draft of a short piece using any of the literary
conventions of a genre (e.g. plot for narrative piece)

Every part of the module contains activities and enhancement exercises

utilizing pictures, and illustrations which have been proven as effective instructional
materials in improving the writing skills of the students.

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 The first learning module contains in Quarter 1 contains the Introduction to
Literary Genres; Understanding conventions of traditional genres; fiction, poetry,
drama and other forms. This include also identifying elements of the different genres
and using elements and techniques to develop themes.
In this module, the students understand the literary conventions that govern
the different genres, thus coherently use a chosen element conventionally identified
with a genre for written output.
What should I expect?
After studying this module, you will be able to:
1. Define creative non-fiction from various writers;
2. Do a close reading of creative non-fictional texts
3. Analyze and interpret the theme and techniques used in a particular texts.
4. Create samples of the literary elements based on one’s experience

Good luck as you begin this module

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 LESSON 1

ANALYSIS ON THEME AND TECHNIQUES USED IN A

PARTICULAR TEXT

Learning Objectives: At the end of this lesson, the learners are expected to:
1. Analyze the theme and techniques used in a particular text
2. Write samples of the Literary Elements Based on One’s Experiences

Let’s Answer This!

Getting Back: Recall what you learned about the literature of the past. Read and
answer the following statements. Write the letter of your answer in your notebook
1.Non Fiction
a. reason for which the author writers c. writer tell his own story
b. writing that is true d. writer gives and explanation of ideas
2. Autobiography
a. writer tells someone else’s story c. writing is not true
b. writer tells his own story d. gives a description of a topic
3. Informational Non-Fiction
a. Intent informing the reader about the topic
b. writing that is not true
c. writer tries to convince the reader
d. original materials that have not been altered
4.Biography
a. writer tells his own story c. writer tells the story of someone else’s
b. short form of literary composition d. writing gives explanation of ideas
5. Any short work of non-fiction offering a part of a magazine, newspaper or book
a. article b. diary c. novel d. blog

6. A type of nonfiction writing that includes personal thoughts and reflections.

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 a. memoir b. biography c. autobiography d. compare and
contrast
7. This pattern of writing shows the order of events occurred
a. categorical b. expository c. chronological d. compare and
contrast 8. What is included in background information?
a. claim b. main character c. conflict d. setting
9. Quote, question, study and statement about life and all are all examples of
______.
a. conflict b. text evidence c. resolution d. leading statement
10. The theme of a story is______________.
a. the problem the character is facing
b. how much is the main character solves his problem
c. the location of the story
d. the lesson or big idea the author is trying to teach about

What is Creative Non Fiction? Is a genre of writing that that uses literary
styles and techniques to factually accurate narratives; these includes autobiography,
biography, literary journalism, reportage, personal narratives, travelogues, reflection,
essay, flash nonfiction or flash essay. It is important to know that creative nonfiction
articles must be factually accurate and written with attention (Wikipedia).

Identifying Themes and Literary Analysis

Read the following story for analysis:
Many Mansions
Small World
Ledesma St., San Juan
It probably was a small house, but size throws off a child. What seems
modest to an adult is extravagance to a little one. It was the world to me. It certainly
seemed ample then. There were three bedrooms, which we called blue, green, and
aircon. Children’s names, these; one bedroom was painted blue, one green, and one
had a new air-conditioner. I don’t remember what we called it before the air-
conditioner arrived, but it was yellow, with a parquet floor and a deep dressing area.
It was the room of my parents, which is why the new Sony color TV and Betamax
were there. The old TV was in the living room downstairs, a Zenith in a large cabinet

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with doors that slid open. In front of it was a coffee table and the blue sofa where
Tito Bing, when he was visiting, would sit shirtless, leaving a deep, sweaty
impression on the vinyl.
My mother sent most of us to piano lessons, and soon enough, a piano took
its place in our living room. We went to a music studio in northeast Greenhills, a
short walk from the Greenhills shopping center. To us that whole complex was
simply Unimart, where my mother bought groceries; then came Virra Mall, a modern
marvel, not yet a seedy haven of smuggled goods. This was my small, well-traveled
universe: Ledesma Street to Unimart; further down Ortigas to Meralco, where my
father worked and where we played tennis on Sunday afternoons; and then on to
Ateneo, where I had studied since grade school.
San Juan seemed pretty much the whole city then, because even my
relatives were there. On M. Paterno Street, adjacent to Ledesma, lived Tito Pepot
with my father’s parents. Tito Tito and the Litonjuas lived in another part of
Greenhills, with Tita Letty and the Mendozas nearby on Mariano Marcos Street.
Sundays we heard mass in Mary the Queen, where I would marry my wife years
later.
The big round dining table was new, and I suppose like a lot of families, we
experienced that moment of bliss when, having changed from a long table to this
round one with a novelty called the lazy susan, we were liberated from the forced
courtesies of asking people to pass this or that dish. I wonder though if something
was lost, if the convenience of just turning an inner platform set on marbles until
what you wanted was right in front of you did away with the learned cordiality, the
togetherness with one’s table mates that taught you the give and take of community.
There were orange glasses and a matching orange pitcher, and at meals
we’d have it and a blue one on the table. Tito Bing would pour orange juice into his
coffee, forgetting that the water was in the orange pitcher, the orange juice in the
blue one. Ledesma Street was a short one, and quiet. Our house was unassuming,
with walls of a modest height and a green gate. The gate opened to a long three-car
garage. We’d play football there, and Bombit, the eldest, once fell on his wrist and
broke it. On birthdays there would be parties, with folding tables from one end to the
other, balloons, spaghetti, hotdogs, ice cream, and our painfully cute posing for
pictures.
Our next-door neighbor made coffins, or so they said. I don’t remember
seeing any. Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone in that tiny gray house on our
left. My mother says that some of the people there had gone insane. Somehow,
coffin-making and insanity come hand in hand, as we’ve learned from old horror
movies.
In high school I discovered the perilous thrill of chasing after girls. Going to
soirées, meeting them, getting their phone numbers, calling them up – how crazy it
all was, to daydream an entire afternoon away, my books on the living room coffee

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table, my head in the clouds. The studying could go to hell as my mind floated in its
hormone-induced bliss. It was a heady time, reveling in the rush of taking risks, then
wallowing in the crushing despair of rejection.
The Assumptionistas wouldn’t let you stay on the phone with them more than
fifteen minutes. The Scholasticans would talk for hours, and I loved that. Niña and I
would talk often, it would be daylight out, then it would be dark and I wouldn’t even
get up to turn on the lights, and we’d talk some more. But I should have seen how
that affair would turn out: she lived on Vito Cruz, way beyond my familiar orbit. At a
certain point, we saw each other at a volleyball game in La Salle Greenhills, then
asked "Was that you?" later in the evening when I called. When you don’t know what
each other looks like anymore, the courtship has officially failed.
Then we transferred. It was 1984, I was fifteen and finishing my second year
in high school. When we were about to leave, we felt the excitement of moving to a
new house, a bigger one, in a more upscale neighborhood. It meant good things that
we were moving up in the world.

When We Were
Rich Heron St., Greenmeadows

There were no phones. For some reason, our application for two lines had
been held up. Having just moved, I became acutely aware of the lack of
communications, a serious shortcoming in the eyes of a fifteen year-old. In such
ways were an adolescent boy’s inept attempts at wooing adolescent girls doomed
before they hardly had a chance to succeed.
To communicate with the outside world I simply upped and went to a friend’s
house, Gerry’s in Xavierville or Abe’s in La Vista. I would simply show up and take
them by surprise. Was there some emergency? They would ask. Why had I gone all
the way there? Then they realized that without the ability to call them, I had little
choice but to pop up unannounced at their houses, ready to make myself at home
and partake of their meals. Teenagers can get away with such blithe effrontery.
But even with its isolation, remedied a few months after we moved in when
the phone company finally deigned to be of service, the house had its attractions. In
fact, in many ways it was a dream house. It sat on some eight hundred square
meters, more than twice the size of the San Juan house we left behind. And since
the house my civil-engineer father designed used up less than half the lot, we had
more room to roam than we had ever had, or ever would.
I was especially fond of the wide backyard. Half of it was concrete, on which
we thrashed around playing our tortured brand of basketball with an undersized ball
and a makeshift board and ring. The other half was a garden, green and expansive;

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all we had at the back of the Ledesma house was a patch of dark soil where nothing
would grow. Afternoons I’d take the cover off one of the round patio tables and
spread it on the prickly Bermuda grass. I’d lie there on the thick tablecloth that was
just long enough for me and gaze wistfully at a blue, blue sky. The open space of the
backyard gave me a vantage point to the heavens I haven’t had before or since. Not
a bad place to live in for someone who sometimes wanted to just ponder the sky,
who wanted the occasional chance to escape to it.
I did that often, sitting on the sidewalk outside vigilantly watching the sun
setting over what to me was Greenhills (where the girl of special interest to me
lived), or lying on that tablecloth in the garden. Or sitting at the balcony that joined
the rooms of my parents and Pixie, my sister, on the nights I’d suffer an insomnia
attack; my sister asleep in the master bedroom, I’d bring a chair from her room onto
the balcony. An insomniac, who sometimes has no choice but to be awake when the
dark gives way to light, can always treat himself to the dawn sky. For the growing
teen, perhaps the most important thing about the new house were the bedrooms.
For the first time I had my own room, no small thing in a household of five
boys and one girl. An only girl must have her own room, mother reasoned, and we
used to envy Pixie her privilege. When we moved, I, the third child, finally had mine.
This was important. As a child staggers into adolescence, he grows increasingly
ornery when it comes to matters of privacy. At last I had a place where my things,
and thoughts, could be left undisturbed. Late afternoons and early evenings I’d turn
off the lights and play something on my stereo – Barbra Streisand’s "Somewhere" or
Boston’s "More Than a Feeling" or "Amanda," U2’s "With or Without You" – anything
that soared, and turn up the volume. I’d lie in bed facing the window. Or I’d open the
window and sit on the sill, my feet in the plant box, and let the music take me up into
the deepening darkness.

It didn’t take long, though, before I felt that I didn’t quite fit here. Neighbors
can do that to you. On the asphalted tennis court at the park I played mostly with
kids from around the village, kids ten, eleven, twelve years old. And they were kids
in their brash, self-absorbed way. I was never comfortable around them, and I put up
with them only because I enjoyed the game.

On the basketball court things were worse. The brash, self-absorbed kids of
the tennis court were replaced by brash, self-absorbed grown-ups. They found me
quiet, but what was there to talk about? I didn’t smoke, do drugs, party till dawn, or
fawn over cars. In my eyes they were moneyed men in the aimless, petty way I
imagined you grew up to be if you didn’t see anything much that made sense
beyond what you could drive, wear, eat, smoke, or screw. I had nothing to say to
them.
I sensed that it was a matter of time before I had to leave. The land
surrounding our house was empty, but for how long? Houses were going up all
around the subdivision. How long until the banging and clatter of construction work
drove away the quiet, the burgeoning houses encroaching upon us and obstructing

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our view? How long before the whole place was filled with the arrogant, chattering,
idle people I thought my neighbors were?
The parish church didn’t make me feel any better. It was just outside the
village, and Sundays we heard mass there with the rest of the subdivision and
nearby villages. I never liked the church. I thought the immense bug-eyed statue of
Christ above the altar, to which all eyes had to turn, was ill-proportioned and
hideous. It only added to the feeling of strangeness I felt among my expensively
coiffed, dour-faced neighbors. And then there was the sound. No matter what they
did, no matter how they tried, an echo always bounced off the walls and made it
hard to track the priest’s words. The word of God deserved better acoustics.
Maybe it was no accident that my crisis of faith occurred at about that time. It
was hard enough grappling with soul-piercing questions of faith; it became tougher
to hang on to God in a place that didn’t seem to want you to. How could faith
smolder in a house of worship cold as this? I stopped going to that church, or any
other. I see now that such thoughts could probably weigh heavily only on the
mind of a mid-teen, one grown attuned, excessively perhaps, to the hollowness of
conformity. I was fighting my quiet rebellions, against family, school, social classes,
God – the things that boxed me in and told who I should be, what I should believe in,
how I should behave. I was concerned, maybe too much so, with the incongruence
between who you were and who you pretended to be. It was too easy to judge.
And perhaps a teenager feels more acutely than others that he is an outsider.
Was I one of them? Yes and no, and I squirmed at the contradiction. There I was in
their midst, living a comfortable life in one of their cushy houses. I wanted the money
and what it could buy (in a family of six children one feels that there is never enough
to go around). But I spurned the accoutrements of such a life, the status symbols,
the badges one wore to prove membership in what I thought was a vacuous elite. I
felt uneasy knowing I wasn’t poor, that my skin was pale, that I spoke in competent
English, that my tastes weren’t lowbrow, that I ate well, that we had cars and maids
and an eight-hundred square-meter house in a posh private subdivision, that I
studied in an expensive exclusive school – that I was part of a narrow stratum of
society that did exceedingly well at fending for itself. This was who I was, and it
wasn’t all right with me. I had become what I scorned: a rich kid. It was one other
thing to fight.

In the end, perhaps all this – the uneasiness, the awkwardness, the wanting
to be both in and out of the club – was simply part of the growing pains, endured
during an adolescent’s labored and fitful evolution toward a higher form of being.
Perhaps I was simply suffering the displacedness one first comes to notice as a
teenager, the universal feeling of not quite being at home anywhere, even in one’s
skin. I’ve never lost that feeling. It’s probably just another part of the turmoil of living
in a world that turns and turns without asking if it’s all too fast for you.
Soon enough, my father told us that we had to move out. He no longer
wanted to stay in the construction arm of Meralco, which he had served for decades.

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He wanted to strike out on his own with a new company, with his own people. And
that meant earning less. The house had to go, or rather, we had to let go of it.
In August of 1989, two months into my last year as an undergraduate in
college, some five years after we first moved in, we trundled out of the house on our
trusty old Hi-Ace and a small truck my father borrowed from the office. Years later,
we would look back at the years we spent there and chuckle: those were the days
when we were rich, the days of our brief but failed foray into the ranks of the
wealthy.
When my mind wanders back to those days, I’m often back on the balcony
outside my sister’s room, up at daybreak because I haven’t slept a wink, and I watch
the darkness turn into a thin gray, then a blue that grows more and more vivid, the
wisps of clouds streaked with red, herald of the arriving sun. "Night’s candles are
burnt out and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top," wrote
Shakespeare. Those years in that house when I had a balcony seat to the break of
day I knew exactly what he meant.

The House on Stilts

Mariano Marcos St., San Juan

We called it Ortega, but it wasn’t really on Ortega Street. It was on Mariano

Marcos in San Juan, but we had called it Ortega all our lives, and Ortega it still is.
That was how we called it, the way the house on Ledesma Street is "Ledesma," the
house on Heron Street "Greenmeadows" (not Heron); the way my wife calls the
Malate house she was born in "Vermont," though Vermont Street has been J. Nakpil
for ages.
It felt strange, karmic in a bad way, that we were moving into it. My Tita Letty
and my Mendoza cousins had stayed in that house all the years I was growing up,
and they had just moved into a none-too-posh subdivision in Marikina, not like the
grander ones in the Ortigas area we were leaving. We knew it was going to be a
step down.
It was. From the surface sheen of Greenmeadows to this. The house
seemed old, and more importantly, run down. It stood on stilts, as we kids called
them, the house raised from the ground a few feet, in the style of older times for
some purpose we no longer thought applicable. The doors didn’t have knobs, just
handles and hooks. They closed because of springs attached at the top. You’d hear
them bang, the spring’s squeak, when someone passed through. When typhoons
hit, the house made a low rumble as storm winds made the doors and windows jitter,
as if it all would finally come apart.
The interiors were tighter, the corridors narrower, and – perhaps the surest
sign of our harder times – there were fewer bathrooms. There were no marbled
floors as in Greenmeadows, just narrow wooden planks worn away at some places,
and they creaked under your step. The windows weren’t sheets of tinted glass on

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large metal frames; they were made of wooden and capiz panels, in the style of old
houses I see only in Manila or the provinces.
This house sat on an unusually shaped corner lot, with one road (Smuth,
which we never did learn how to pronounce) rising sharply upwards from Mariano
Marcos, creating a pizza-pie slice of land. At the thin end of the pie slice was the
gate, which opened to a long driveway of concrete that was broken in some places.
When it rained, opening the gate was a chore; it was low, water collected just under
it, and my mother eventually bought boots and left them by the front door with an
umbrella. The plan was for us to stay here while our new house in Marikina, in the
same middle-class village our cousins had transferred to, was being built. We didn’t
know how long that would take, but it seemed to slow down when the Gulf War
broke out and prices shot up. That was the attitude: we were here only in transit.
When you walked into the master bedroom, you could tell we didn’t intend to stay.
Together with my parents’ queen-size bed were single beds, a red sofa, and wing
chairs, all refugees from the house on Heron Street that was no longer ours. They
seemed to be biding their time, waiting to be restored to their rightful place, to a
room more in keeping with their status.
The house may not have been much to look at. And commuting to anywhere
was harder since it was a long walk toward the nearest jeepney routes. The drive to
Ateneo was longer. But it wasn’t without charms. It had wide open spaces, for one
thing. There was a garden, which wasn’t like the manicured, sculpted showcase in
Greenmeadows; it was thick with grass green and wild, not prickly bermuda. The
earth was soft under your running shoes. In the evenings I’d look out from the living
room window at the grass shimmering in the ghostly moonlight.
At dusk fat flies hovered eerily in the air, after darkness had relented but
before the sun had come out, as if presiding over some solemn ceremony in which
the night gave leave to the day. I saw that strange but wondrous rite several times
because of my insomnia attacks. One summer I suffered a particularly severe one.
I’d go to bed at ten then be awake at two, unable to sleep anymore. I’d get up and
play games on the computer, watch tapes, read. When my mother got up at dawn I’d
help her heat some water for coffee, put ice in and fill the water jug, and sit at the
kitchen table. We weren’t talkative at five in the morning, so we would just drink
coffee. When it started to get light out I’d take a walk or jog, pounding the concrete
and the soft earth and grass, making small circles in the yard, the fat flies that
buzzed softly paying no heed. I’d come in and eat a heavy breakfast, sleep the
whole afternoon, then go through it all again that night. Somehow, after weeks of
this, I was finally able to fall asleep at midnight and wake at eight. I counted my
blessings, old house included. The end came soon enough. The owners of the lot
had sold it to a townhouse developer, and we had until the end of March 1992 to
move out. It had been nearly three years.
We packed up and started shuttling between this place and the next, but
moving seemed like more work this time than when we left Greenmeadows. The
trips to Marikina were longer than the ones from Ortigas to San Juan, and the traffic
had only grown heavier. We’d be able to make only two, maybe three trips a day

10
before pleading exhaustion. The HiAce got worn down quickly. On our last trip we
stuffed everything that would fit into the cars, just barely fitting into them ourselves,
and drove out for the last time it was also my last day as a teacher in the Ateneo
High School: March 29, Sunday, graduation day. I’d taught there two years. That last
year I’d met Hilda. On my first date with her in the middle of August, I came home at
six in the morning. We had been on the couch in her living room talking until two, fell
asleep, and woke up at five thirty, my head still on her lap. My mother opened the
gate, a look of worry on her face, as if afraid she’d lost me to someone else. She did.
One week later Hilda agreed to be my girlfriend, my first ever. Five years later we
were married.
After two years on probation at Ateneo High, my contract wasn’t renewed,
and on that last day I stuffed what was left of my things into plastic shopping bags
and, after the ceremony and a complimentary dinner, threw them into a car and
drove off into the night. No job, new house, no teary farewells. A few days later, my
mother would go back to try to retrieve some more things. The gate was open, she
said; someone had shit on the driveway. Faucets and other fixtures were gone, tiles
torn out, the place a mess. I’m glad I never saw that. Then they torched the house,
easier and cheaper than tearing it down, and I suppose that was good, as good a
way as any to go.

Five Brothers, One Mother

Taurus St., Cinco Hermanos, Marikina

The Marikina house wasn’t finished yet, but with an ultimatum hanging over
our heads, we had no choice but to move in. Just how unfinished the house was
became bruisingly clear on our first night. There was no electricity yet, and the
windows didn’t have screens. There were mosquitoes. I couldn’t sleep the whole
night. My sister slept on a cot out in the upstairs hall instead of her room downstairs,
maybe because it was cooler here. Every so often she would toss and turn, waving
bugs away with half-asleep hands. I sat beside her and fanned her. She had work
the next day. In the morning someone went out and bought boxes and boxes of
Katol.
Work on the house would continue, but it remains unfinished eight years later.
All the interiors, after a few years of intermittent work, are done. But the exterior
remains unpainted, still the same cement gray as the day we moved in, though
grimier now. Marikina’s factories aren’t too far away. The garden remains
ungreened; earth, stones, weeds, and leaves are where I suppose bermuda grass
will be put down someday.
In my eyes the Marikina house is an attempt to return to the successful
Greenmeadows plan, but with more modest means at one’s disposal. The living
room of the Cinco Hermanos house features much of the same furniture, a similar
look. The sofa and wing chairs seem at ease again. My mother’s growing collection

11
of angel figurines is the new twist. But there is less space in this room, as in most of
the rooms in the Marikina house, since it is a smaller house on a smaller lot.
The kitchen is carefully planned, as was the earlier one, the cooking and
eating areas clearly demarcated. There is again a formal dining room, and the new
one seems to have been designed for the long narra dining table, a lovely Designs
Ligna item, perhaps the one most beautiful piece of furniture we have, bought on the
cheap from relatives leaving the country in a hurry when we still were on Heron
Street.
Upstairs are the boys’ rooms. The beds were the ones custom-made for the
Greenmeadows house, the same ones we’d slept in since then. It was a loft or an
attic, my mother insisted, which is why the stairs had such narrow steps. But this
"attic," curiously enough, had two big bedrooms as well as a wide hall. To those of
us who actually inhabited these rooms, the curiosity was an annoyance. There was
no bathroom, so if you had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night you had to go
down the stairs and come back up again, by which time you were at least half
awake.
Perhaps there was no difference between the two houses more basic, and
more dramatic, than their location. This part of Marikina is not quite the same as the
swanky part of Ortigas we inhabited for five years. Cinco Hermanos is split by a
road, cutting it into two phases, that leads on one end to Major Santos Dizon, which
connects Marcos Highway with Katipunan Avenue. The other end of the road stops
at Olandes, a dense community of pedicabs, narrow streets, and poverty. The noise
– from the tricycles, the chattering on the street, the trucks hurtling down Marcos
Highway in the distance, the blaring of the loudspeaker at our street corner put there
by eager-beaver baranggay officials – dispels any illusions one might harbor of
having returned to a state of bliss.
The first floor is designed to create a clear separation between the family and
guest areas, so one can entertain outsiders without disturbing the house’s
inhabitants. This principle owes probably more to my mother than my father. After
all, she is the entertainer, the host. The living room, patio, and dining room – the
places where guests might be entertained – must be clean and neat, things in their
places. She keeps the kitchen achingly well-organized, which is why there are lots of
cabinets and a deep cupboard.
And she put them to good use. According to Titus, the fourth, who
accompanied her recently while grocery shopping, she buys groceries as if all of us
still lived there. I don’t recall the cupboard ever being empty. That became her way
of mothering. As we grew older and drifted farther and farther away from her grasp,
defining our own lives outside of the house, my mother must have felt that she was
losing us to friends, jobs, loves – forces beyond her control. Perhaps she figured that
food, and a clean place to stay, was what we still needed from her. So over the last
ten years or so she has become more involved in her cooking, more attentive,
better. She also became fussier about meals, asking if you’ll be there for lunch or
dinner so she knows how much to cook, reprimanding the one who didn’t call to say

12
he wasn’t coming home for dinner after all, or the person who brought guests home
without warning. There was more to it than just knowing how much rice to cook.

I know it gives her joy to have relatives over during the regular Christmas and
New Year get-togethers, which have been held in our house for the past half-decade
or so. She brings out the special dishes, cups and saucers, platters, glasses, bowls,
coasters and doilies she herself crocheted. Perhaps I understand better why her
Christmas decor has grown more lavish each year. After seeing off the last guests
after the most recent gathering, she sighed, "Ang kalat ng bahay!" I didn’t see her
face, but I could hear her smiling. My father replied, "Masaya ka naman." It wasn’t a
secret. Sundays we come over to the house, everyone who has moved out, and
have lunch together. Sunday lunches were always differently esteemed in our
household. Now that some of us have left, I sense that my siblings try harder than
they ever did to be there. I know I do. I try not to deprive my mother the chance to do
what she does best.

13
Epilogue

The dispersal began in the mid-eighties when Bombit went to the United
States and never returned. He left some months after we’d moved to
Greenmeadows, yet I have no memory of him there. (In memory there are no things,
only worlds. Things never exist by themselves, but only with and against other
things, between backgrounds and foregrounds, swimming in contexts. This is how
we can remember that something is out of place, like a fancy wing chair in the
master bedroom of a worn-down house, like an eldest brother in a house he left
behind. I remember him only in Ledesma, the rough playmate, sometimes the bully
who held us in his thrall, who would jump on cockroaches with glee, who would take
alarm clocks apart and not put them back together. I remember him in the green
station wagon, pillows in the back, disappearing for days visiting his girlfriend in
Manila. In the US they would get married, have two kids, and divorce messily. The
guest room in the Marikina house is for him, for his hoped-for return. The exodus
resumed in 1996 when I got married and moved to Diliman. Pixie, my only sister, the
fifth child, married in December 1999 and moved to Blue Ridge. Titus, the fourth,
transferred to a Makati apartment with his wife after their wedding this past March.
Raul, the second, and Mikko, the sixth and youngest, are left with my parents. My
father is what most people would call a man of few words. He was a father of few
words as well. These past few years I’ve tried to talk to him more and more, which is
special because we never did when I was younger. We often talk about money. I am
amazed to learn how little we had in the first place, and I wonder how we could have
afforded the Greenmeadows house, how much he has lost keeping the company he
started afloat, how much he still owes here and there.

To me it makes more and more sense for him to sell the Marikina house, use
some of the money to pay off his debts, buy a condominium with two or three
bedrooms, and live off the interest on what remains, which would still be substantial.
I’ve mentioned this to him a few times, and he seems receptive. But I wonder if
there’s such a thing as a transfer threshold, dislocation fatigue that accumulates
over a lifetime of setting up in one place then moving. By my count the Cinco
Hermanos house is my father’s eighth home. Will he and my mother be too tired, too
weary for another relocation? A few years ago my father and his brothers and
sisters sold their house in San Juan. Built in 1948, it had lasted nearly half a century,
sheltering my grandfather and grandmother and their eight children. They had
planned to build a condominium on the lot, but the real estate bubble of the mid-
nineties convinced them that it would be better to just sell. It was sold. That was not
my father’s first house, though it seemed so to me. Born in 1935, he lived near
Pinaglabanan church, then in 1940 at the corner of M. Paterno and Alfonso XIII, with
relatives. In my mind the Paterno house was his first, not just because I hadn’t seen
the first two (the first is gone, the second rebuilt). The Paterno house was where his
father and mother lived, and I’d always imagined them and their children making do
in that structure that weathered the decades. When we were little, my siblings and

14
cousins, we spent Sundays there. I learned how to ride a bicycle on the long
driveway. We played tennis on a neighbor’s court after climbing the back wall. In the
grassy front yard we played baseball, and I hit the first homerun in that tiny ballpark.
We fished for star apples with long bamboo sticks, picked dewy santan, got caught
in the thorny bougainvillea bushes retrieving errant pingpong balls. The last time I
passed by the lot the house had been torn down. My father would have been
thirteen when he moved into it; he was over sixty when he and his brothers and
sisters let it go. It made sense to sell it, but I wonder if anything was bargained away
in the transaction. He had lost his parents years before. Was losing the house a final
orphaning? Is this the last one? Am I here for good? Or should I keep the boxes and
packing tape handy? Houses provided us the necessary certainties – somewhere to
come home to where you’d find your family, your things, a hot dinner, a bed or a
good couch. Write to me here. Call me at this number. But I’ve changed addresses
and phone numbers enough times to know better. Perhaps that’s what houses are
really about: the fundamental uncertainty of life, the slowly learned fact that the
reference points by which we draw our maps and chart our course are ever shifting,
and a life’s cartography is never quite done. That isn’t necessarily a sad thing.
Perhaps the houses are no longer, but somewhere inside me I am still marveling at
the break of day, at the way the moon illuminates the grass, at the way the lives of
those I’ve lived with have crisscrossed and intertwined with mine, no matter how
tangled up it all sometimes got. I count my blessings, the ghosts of houses past
included.

This essay won First prize for the Essay in the 2000 Palanca Awards

After Reading the above stories, do Activity below:

Activity 1.1.1
Students will be divided into 4 groups and each group will be assigned to a
particular segment of the story (1 ) Many Mansions, (2) Small World, (3) When We
Were Rich, (4)The House on Stilts, (5) Five Brothers, One Mother. They are going to
analyze each section using the literary tools. After crafting their analysis posted in a
white cartolina, they will briefly report and then followed by a short dramatization
assigned to them.

15
Literary tools
Type of Mansion Analysis

1. Plot (synopsis)
2. Setting
3. Mood
4. Characters in the Story
5. Point of view used
6. Symbolism
7. Theme

Note to the Teacher: Have your assessment on the above activity; likewise decide
the scoring.
For the drama/role play you can employ these rubrics:
Pp128
Source: Writing in Creative Non-Fiction by Sonia B. Sygaco

16
Activity 1.1.2: Memory Walk Writing Activity
Go on a walk around your place you know well, maybe it’s your home, your
neighborhood or a specific park or building. As you’re walking make a mental note of
places that trigger certain memories from your past .Then when you get back from
your walk, write about the most vivid memory you have collected

Source: study.com

MASTERFUL SKILLED ABLE DEVELOPING NOVICE ACTUAL

CRITERIA
(5 pts) (4 pts) (3 pts) (2 pts) (1 pt) SCORE
Outline,
Focus,
Purpose
(Controlling
Idea)
10 pts
Ideas support
and
development
(Evidence) 10
pts
Structure,
Organization
10 pts
Vocabulary
and Word
Usage
10 pts
TOTAL Score
Source: Writing Techniques in Creative Non-fiction by Sonia B. Sygaco

17
 Let’s Do It!
Activity 1.1.3
Analyze the text that capture the photo in Time Magazine, November 1990 (Write
analysis on the photo that Humanized AIDS)
The Photo that Changed the Face of AIDS

RUBRIC
Awesome Good Effort A Work in Just
Criteria
(4) (3) Progress (2) Beginning (1)
Makes a complete Makes a detailed Makes a detailed Description are
and detailed description most of description some not detailed or
description of the the subject matter of the subject complete
Objective subject matter and/or elements matter and/or
and/or elements seen in the elements seen in
seen in the photograph the photograph
photograph
Provides a Provides a Provides some Summary is not
complete summary somewhat summary about detailed or
of the situation and complete summary the situation and complete
Knowledge time period shown, of the situation and time period shown,
and the people and time period shown, and the people
objects that appear. and the people and and objects that
objects that appear. appear.
Interpretation Forms a Forms somewhat Relates how Finds it difficult

18
 reasonable reasonable photograph makes to interpret the
hypothesis about hypothesis about him/her fee meaning of the
what is viewed in what is viewed in personally. photograph.
the photograph and the photograph and
is able to support is able to support
this with evidence with some evidence
from the from the
photograph photograph
Finds detailed Finds some Finds the time Does not find
information about information about period for the any information
Future
the time period and the time period and photograph. about the
Research
relates It to the relates it to the photograph.
photograph photograph.
Source: http://www.cyberbee.com/artifacts/Photo%20Analysis%20Rubric.pdf

19
 Let’s Answer This!
Multiple Choice. Choose the letter that best answers the given question. Write the
letter of your answer in your notebook.
1. Hints or clues as to what will happen?
a. mood c. personification
b. point of view d. foreshadowing
2. Contrast between what is expected and what actually happens
a. symbol c. simile
b. b. conflict d. irony
3. Perspective from which the story is told
a. mood c. tone
b. point of view d. personification
4. Time and place of action in the story
a. character c. setting
b. theme d. imagery
5. The main event or sequence in the study
a. setting c. plot
b. character d. mood
6. This is referred to as the atmosphere of a literary piece
a. conflict c. climax
b. mood d. theme
7. The performers that do the action and speak dialogue in the story
a. plot c. character
b. story d. imagery
8. A representation using an object or a mood to represent an abstract idea
a. character c. mood
b. symbolism d. foreshadow
9. The underlying message that a writer wants to get across such as bravery,
perseverance or undying love
a. tone c. mood
b. theme d. conflict
10. Literary elements of the story which is considered as the turning point of a
narrative work is it’s point of highest tension or drama
a. climax c. conflict
b. characterization d. tone

20
 Let’s Remember This!
Complete the paragraph with the necessary words or sentences that best describe
what you have learned from the discussion. Write your paragraph in your notebook.
Follow the format below.
I have learned that writing in Creative non-fiction

Congratulations!

You successfully did it. Now, let’s move to lesson 2

21
 LESSON 2

LITERARY ELEMENTS BASED ON ONE’S EXPERIENCE

Learning Competency 1B.Create Sample of Literary Elements based on

Experience (e.g. Metaphor to describe an emotion)
Learning Objectives: At the end of the module, the learners shall be able to:
Write literary elements based on one’s experience (e.g. metaphor to describe an
emotion)

Activity 1.2.1
Do you ever wonder the different theme/analysis and techniques used in particular
text, article, narrative, biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, travelogue, literary
journal, chronicle and personal essay?
Well you can write any idea you have inside the box. Choose only one.

22
 The genre of creative nonfiction also known as literary nonfiction is broad
enough to include travel writing (travelogue) nature writing, science writing, sports,
writing, biography, autobiography, memoir, the interview and both the familiar and
personal essay ; although there is no such as new in nonfiction most common
usually encountered like what has been mentioned. There are some forms of
nonfiction like the docufiction, documentary film, Gonzo journalism and nonfiction
novel.
The difference between creative writing and nonfiction is that nonfiction, by contrast
is factual and reports on true events. Histories, biographies, journalism and essays
are all considered nonfiction. This has given rise to a new trend called creative
nonfiction, which uses the techniques of fiction to report on true events.

Docufiction (or docu-fiction), often confused with docudrama, is the

cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning
narrative film.
It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is (as direct
cinema or cinéma vérité) and which simultaneously introduces unreal elements or
fictional situations in narrative in order to strengthen the representation of reality
using some kind of artistic expression. More precisely, it is a documentary
contaminated with fictional elements, in real time, filmed when the events take place,
and in which someone – the character – plays his own role in real life. A film genre in
expansion, it is adopted by a number of experimental filmmakers.
The new term docufiction appeared at the beginning of the 21st century. It is
now commonly used in several languages and widely accepted for classification by
international film festivals. Either in cinema or television, docufiction is, anyway, a
film genre in full development during the first decade of this century. The word
docufiction is also sometimes used to refer to literary journalism (creative nonfiction).
(https://findwords.info/term/docufiction)
A documentary film is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality,
primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record"
- compare documentary theatre. Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in
terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience
reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries". Documentary films,
originally called "actuality films", lasted one minute, or less. Over time,
documentaries have evolved to become longer in length, and to include more

23
categories; some examples being: educational, observational, and docufiction.
Documentaries are meant [by whom?] to be informative works, and are often used
within schools, as a resource to teach various principles.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_film)

Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity,

often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word
"gonzo" is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter
S. Thompson, who later popularized the style. It is an energetic first-person
participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power
from a combination of social critique and self-satire. It has since been applied to
other subjective artistic endeavors.
Gonzo journalism involves an approach to accuracy that concerns the
reporting of personal experiences and emotions, in contrast to traditional journalism,
which favors a detached style and relies on facts or quotations that can be verified
by third parties. Gonzo journalism disregards the strictly-edited product favored by
newspaper media and strives for a more personal approach; the personality of a
piece is as important as the event or actual subject of the piece. Use of sarcasm,
humor, exaggeration, and profanity is common.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism)
The non-fiction novel is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real
historical figures and actual events woven together with fictitious conversations and
uses the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise
loosely defined and flexible genre. The genre is sometimes referred to using the
slang term "faction", a portmanteau of the words fact and fiction.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fiction_novel)

24
 Enrichment
Activity 1.2.2
Create 4 groups and each group will provide a PowerPoint presentation in 10-15
minutes a sample of the following:
• Docufiction (excerpt)
• Documentary film (excerpt)
• Gonzo journalism (excerpt)
• Non Fiction Novel (excerpt)

Let’s Do It!

Activity 1.2.3
Do profile writing about a person (one you really love/ like and the other person
whom you hate/dislike; you can use a pseudo name)
State orally to the class your output, considering why one is easier for you to like,
than the other in comparison. (Using metaphor to describe an emotion)

25
Rubrics for Grading:

CRITERIA MASTERFU SKILLE ABL DEVELOPIN NOVIC ACTUA

L D E G E L
(5pts) (4pts) (3pts (2pts) (1pt) SCORE
)

Outline,
Focus,
Purpose
(Controlling
idea)

5pts

Ideas
support and
developmen
t

5pts

Structure,
organization

5pts

Vocabulary
and Word
Usage

5pts

Total Score

25pts

26
 Let’s Answer This!
Multiple Choice. Choose the letter that best answers the given question. Write the
letter of your answer in your notebook.
1. Nonfiction is
a. true c. a combination of True and Made up
b. made up d. written only by adults
2. The best description of how caption are used is
a. add additional information like names or descriptive
b. add facts to a graph or pie chart
c. provide a title for a passage
d. list the author of passage
3. The following are examples of non-fiction
a. auto-biographies, biographies, articles, science fiction
b. auto-biographies, biographies, articles and brochures
c. auto-biographies, biographies, brochures and poetry
d. auto-biographies, biographies, docufiction and memoir
4. Why it is important to get facts in nonfiction writing?
a. It isles important than we might think, many non-fiction books are published
with factual errors
b. It is important because the credibility of the author and the publisher are
reflected in the reliability of factual claims made in the book
c. It is less important than we might think; the work may contain a mixture of
verifiable facts and approximate facts or grassword by the author
d. It is important because sales will be higher if there is more fictional
context, even in a nonfiction book
5. It is a descriptive writing focused on a subject and provides a detailed information
on it.
a. Narrative essay c. memoir
b. Journal article d. profile writing

27
6. Which of the following is not true about biography?
a. A written history of a person’s life
b. An account or the story of a real person’s life written by another person
c. It is about the life of a person narrates by himself or herself
d. None of the above
7. It is the most popular form of literature which is classified as a prose composition
and attempts to explain or clear up an idea, perception or point of view
a. Editorial c. fiction
b. Modern essay d. research report
8. This is the part of the introduction that grabs the reader’s attention
a. Reasons c. leading statement/hook
b. Conflict d. claim
9. Quote, statement, story and a statement about life are all examples of a
a. Conflict c. resolution
b. Text evidence d. leading statement
10. In analysis of creative nonfiction, what is the purpose of concluding sentence?
a. To end a paragraph
b. To tie together the answer and evidence
c. To confuse the reader
d. To make sure the reader understood

28
 LESSON 3

ANALYZING FACTUAL/NONFICTIONAL ELEMENTS IN

THE TEXT

Learning Objectives: at the end of this lesson, the learners are expected to:
1. Analyze essays and articles applying the different literary devices in the text.
2. Answer all the given activities presented in the module.

Let’s Answer This!

Multiple Choice: Choose the letter that best answer to the corresponding questions.
Encircle the letter of your answer and write it on your notebook.
1. Drama means...
a. A Greek word
b. A kind of play
c. Too many emotions
d. To act and imitate reality
2. 5 Elements of Drama include...
a. Voice, Setting, Character, Movement and Acting
b. Role/Character, Relationship, Time/Place, Tension and Focus
c. Conflict, Space, Voice, Staging and Relationship
d. Volume, Facial Expressions, Place, Use of Props and Setting
3. A monologue is...
a. A conversation between characters
b. Small movable objects
c. Private thoughts said out loud by one character
d. The hero's goal or job

29
4. The hero's task is...
a. What the villain is trying to destroy
b. What the hero learns from events
c. What the hero is trying to accomplish
d. Save somebody
5. Motivations are...
a. Reasons for a character to do what he or she does
b. Events that a character takes part in
c. Conflicts that a character faces
d. A task that the hero must accomplish
6. Conversation between two characters is called...
a. A monologue
b. A discussion
c. A dialogue
d. A quotation
7. Italicized portions of text that give information beyond the dialogue and help the
audience interpret the scene are called... 
a. Stage directions
b. Rules
c. Movements
d. Dialogue
8. Symbolism...
a. Props on the stage
b. Backdrops 
c. Characters and/or props that reinforce the plot and theme of a drama
d. Audience imagination
9. The small divisions in a play. 
a. Sections
b. Scenes
c. Chapters
d. Acts
10. The setting of a drama is....
a. Limited by what the audience can see on the stage and allows for the
audience to visualize the scene
b. Time in history
c. The stage
d. How the actors know where to go

30
 Let’s Move On

Diagram Plotting
Read the given story below and identify the plot according to its part. Put your
answer in the given graphic organizer below and write it in your notebook.
FALLING ACTION
RISING ACTION

RESOLUTION
EXPOSITION

CLIMAX

PLOT

31
32
 Elements of Factual/Nonfictional in Texts
A. Plot
A plot is the sequence of events that make up a story, it is either told, written, filmed,
or sung. The plot is the story, and more specifically, how the story is being
developed, unfolds, and moves in time. Plots are typically made up of five main
elements: RISING ACTION CLIMAX

EXPOSITION It is where the main character is in It is the peak of the story, it is where
crisis and events leading up to major event occurs in which the main
It is beginning of the story facing the conflict begin to unfold. character faces a major enemy, fear,
where characters, setting, and Also, it is where the story becomes challenge, or other source of conflict.
the main conflict are complicated. The most action, drama, change, and
typically introduced. excitement occurs here.

FALLING ACTION RESOLUTION

It is where the story begins to Also known as the denouement, the

slow down and work towards its resolution is like a concluding paragraph
end, tying up loose ends. that resolves any remaining issues and
ends the story.

Here are a few very short stories with sample plots:

Example 1
Kaitlin wants to buy a puppy. She goes to the pound and begins looking through the
cages for her future pet. At the end of the hallway, she sees a small, sweet brown
dog with a white spot on its nose. At that instant, she knows she wants to adopt him.
After he receives shots and a medical check, she and the dog, Berkley, go home
together.

In this example, the exposition introduces us to Kaitlin and her conflict. She wants a

puppy but does not have one. The rising action occurs as she enters the pound and
begins looking. The climax is when she sees the dog of her dreams and decides to
adopt him. The falling action consists of a quick medical check before the resolution,
or ending, when Kaitlin and Berkley happily head home.

Example 2
Scott wants to be on the football team, but he’s worried he won’t make the team. He
spends weeks working out as hard as possible, preparing for try outs. At try outs, he

33
amazes coaches with his skill as a quarterback. They ask him to be their starting
quarterback that year and give him a jersey. Scott leaves the field, ecstatic!
The exposition introduces Scott and his conflict: he wants to be on the team but he
doubts his ability to make it. The rising action consists of his training and try-out; the
climax occurs when the coaches tell him he’s been chosen to be quarterback. The
falling action is when Scott takes a jersey and the resolution is him leaving the try-
outs as a new, happy quarterback.

Each of these stories has

 an exposition as characters and conflicts are introduced

 a rising action which brings the character to the climax as conflicts are
developed and faced, and
 a falling action and resolution as the story concludes.

Types of Plot
There are many types of plots in the world! But, realistically, most of them fit
some pattern that we can see in more than one story. Here are some classic plots
that can be seen in numerous stories all over the world and throughout history.
a. Overcoming the Monster
The protagonist must defeat a monster or force in order to save some people—
usually everybody! Most often, the protagonist is forced into this conflict, and comes
out of it as a hero, or even a king. This is one version of the world’s most universal
and compelling plot—the ‘monomyth’ described by the great thinker Joseph
Campbell.
 Examples:
Beowulf, Harry Potter, and Star Wars.
b. Rags to Riches:
This story can begin with the protagonist being poor or rich, but at some point, the
protagonist will have everything, lose everything, and then gain it all back by the end
of the story, after experiencing great personal growth.
Examples:
The Count of Monte Cristo, Cinderella, and Jane Eyre.
c. The Quest:
The protagonist embarks on a quest involving travel and dangerous adventures in
order to find treasure or solve a huge problem. Usually, the protagonist is forced to
begin the quest but makes friends that help face the many tests and obstacles along
the way. This is also a version of Campbell’s monomyth.

34
Examples:
The Iliad, The Lord of the Rings, and Eragon

d. Voyage and Return:

The protagonist goes on a journey to a strange or unknown place, facing danger and
adventures along the way, returning home with experience and understanding. This
is also a version of the monomyth.
Examples:
Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Wizard of Oz
e. Comedy:
A happy and fun character finds a happy ending after triumphing over difficulties and
adversities.
Examples:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Home Alone
f. Tragedy:
The protagonist experiences a conflict which leads to very bad ending,
typically death.
Examples:
Romeo and Juliet, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Macbeth
g. Rebirth:
The protagonist is a villain who becomes a good person through the experience of
the story’s conflict.
Examples:
The Secret Garden, A Christmas Carol, The Grinch
As these seven examples show, many stories follow a common pattern. In fact,
according to many thinkers, such as the great novelist Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph
Campbell, there are only a few basic patterns, which are mixed and combined to
form all stories.
The Importance of Using Plot
The plot is what makes a story a story. It gives the story character
development, suspense, energy, and emotional release (also known as
‘catharsis’). It allows an author to develop themes and most importantly,

35
conflict that makes a story emotionally engaging; everybody knows how hard it is to
stop watching a movie before the conflict is resolved.

Plots can be found in all kinds of fiction. Here are a few examples.
Example 1
The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham
In The Razor’s Edge, Larry Darrell returns from World War I disillusioned. His
fiancée, friends, and family urge him to find work, but he does not want to. He
embarks on a voyage through Europe and Asia seeking higher truth. Finally, in Asia,
he finds a more meaningful way of life.
In this novel, the plot follows the protagonist Larry as he seeks meaningful
experiences. The story begins with the exposition of a disillusioned young man who
does not want to work. The rising action occurs as he travels seeking an education.
The story climaxes when he becomes a man perfectly at peace in meditation.
Example 2
The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken,” has a very clear plot: The
exposition occurs when a man stands at the fork of two roads, his conflict being
which road to take. The climax occurs when he chooses the unique path. The
resolution announces that “that has made all the difference,” meaning the man has
made a significant and meaningful decision.

36
Plot Devices are ways of propelling the storyline to move forward. It serves to
motivate the characters, creating urgency of resolving complicated situations. This
however can be compared with moving a story forward using a dramatic method by
making it happen since the character are capable of doing “well developed reasons”.
Plot Outline is a narrative of a story that can be transformed into a film. It consists of
a page with longer and detailed synopsis summarized into one or two paragraphs.
B. Conflict are problems, issues, or situations that the character needs to
resolve through time. Conflict is often expressed through the actions and
dialogues of the character(s).
Types of Conflict
(1) One Character Against Another Conflict shows one character having a
grievance against another character.
(2) A Character or Group Against Society Conflict demonstrates a character
who is against society’s values, ideas, norms, culture, and values.
(3) A Character Against Nature Conflict reflects a character who is wrestling
with natural disasters or calamities.
(4) Character Against Himself or Herself Conflict illustrates the inner struggles
and emotions of the character (wood, 2013).
Theme pertains to the idea that philosophers deeply think or it is simply the subject
of the story.
Character
A character is an individual (could be an object or animal but usually as a
person) in a narrative in a work of fiction or creative nonfiction. The act or method of
creating a character in writing is known as characterization.
Characters perform actions, create dialogues, and can be seen through their
physical appearance. “A character may provide background information, description,
or an assessment of another character’s life or personality. However, be sure to filter
out character’s bias (woods, 2013, p.142).
Types of Characterization
1. Direct (Explicit) Characterization- informs the readers of what the character
is like which can be deciphered through the narrator, or through how the
characters behave, act, or speak.
2. Indirect (Implicit) Characterization – allows the readers to infer about the
character’s thoughts, actions, conversations, physical appearance,
idiosyncrasies, and workmanship or team play with other characters.

The Character’s conversations will reflect his or her personality, determining

whether the character is educated or not, the formality and informality of the
situation.

37
 Point of view is the perspective from which a speaker or writer recounts a narrative
or presents information. This is also known as a viewpoint. This depends on the
topic, purpose, and audience. Writers of nonfiction may rely on the first-person point
of view (I, we), the second-person (you, your, you're), or the third-person (he, she, it,
they).

With first-person point of view, the character is telling the story. You will see
the words "I," "me," or "we" in first-person point of view. This point of view is
commonly used for narratives and autobiographies.

First-person point of view can be singular or plural. The singular form uses "I"
or "me" and plural form uses the word "we." Both are used to give the writer's
personal perspective.

Some examples of first-person narrative include:

 I always look forward to my summer vacation at the beach. I

like to collect seashells and swim in the ocean.
 We love walking the dogs in the woods. We all think it is so
much fun.
 If it was up to me, I would choose the white car.
 We didn't want to drive so we took the train to the city and
back home.

When writing in second-person point of view, the writer has the narrator
speaking to the reader. The words "you," "your," and "yours" are used in this point of
view. Some common uses for second-person point of view are directions, business
writing, technical writing, song lyrics, speeches, and advertising.

Some examples of second-person point of view are:

 In just a few simple steps you can make a big change in your life!
 To make a great chili is you must season it early and often.
 Management is very happy with the progress you are all making.
 You gotta fight for your right to party! - "Fight for Your Right," Beastie Boys

Third-person point of view has an external narrator telling the story. The
words "he," "she," "it," or "they" are used in this point of view. This point of view can
either be omniscient where the reader knows what all the characters are doing in the

38
 story or it can be limited to having the reader only know what is happening to one
specific character. Third person can also be gender specific or neutral, singular or
plural.

Third-person point of view is often used in academic writing and fictional

writing.

Some examples of third person point of view:

 He is a great football player. He scored the most touchdowns this season.

 She was the one who knew all the answers on the test. She had the highest
grade in the entire class.
 What they told her was not the truth.
 She heard a loud crash in the middle of the night. She was so scared that she
didn't know what she should do next.

Angle of the Story

Angle is the precise way to choose on how to tell a story — it’s the element
that sets your story apart from all the rest. In other words, a way of presenting your
information and telling the story that makes it interesting, unique, and memorable.
Angle can be opposite to the ending of the essay, it can be comparisons, or
opposing point of views.
Symbols or Symbolism
Symbols in literary writing is usually applied in poetry and each symbol
signifies a meaning. When an author introduces a particular mood or emotion, the
writer uses symbolism, hinting it rather than saying it literally.
Some common types of symbols are:
black – evil or death ladder – connection between heaven and
earth
broken mirror – separation light – good, power
dark – death, shadows night – end of road, peace, death or
darkness
day – beginning, good, opportunities red rose – love and romance
dove – peace water – baptism, purification
fire – danger, anger, passion, love,
pain or death

39
Symbolism is employed by writers to make the literary piece interesting and the
ability of not giving the literal sense of the ideas or things. Likewise, an action, event,
or exchange of words in a conversation may illicit symbolic values (Literary Devices).
Irony
Irony is the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal
meaning.
Irony is a storytelling tool used to create a contrast between how things seem
and how they really are beneath the surface. The term comes from the Latin
word ironia, which means “feigned ignorance.” The three main types used in
literature are dramatic, situational, and verbal, as mentioned above.

People often conflate irony with sarcasm, coincidence, or bad luck. While these
concepts can have ironic characteristics, they’re not interchangeable with irony.

So for example, if you run to catch the bus and miss it by two seconds,  that’s not
ironic — unless the reason you’re late is that you were bragging about how you
wouldn’t miss the bus. This creates an unexpected and comic contrast to what would
otherwise just be an unfortunate situation. 

Figures of Speech
A figure of speech is a word or phrase that possesses a separate meaning
from its literal definition. It can be metaphor or simile, designed to make a
comparison. It can be the repetition of alliteration or the exaggeration of hyperbole to
provide a dramatic effect.

Types of Figure of Speech

There are countless figures of speech in every language, and they fall into hundreds
of categories. Here, though, is a short list of some of the most common types of
figure of speech:
A. Metaphor
Many common figures of speech are metaphors. That is, they use words in a manner
other than their literal meaning. However, metaphors use figurative language to
make comparisons between unrelated things or ideas. The “peak of her career,” for
example, is a metaphor, since a career is not a literal mountain with a peak, but the
metaphor represents the idea of arriving at the highest point of one’s career.
B. Idiom

40
An idiom is a common phrase with a figurative meaning. Idioms are different from
other figures of speech in that their figurative meanings are mostly known within a
particular language, culture, or group of people. In fact, the English language alone
has about 25,000 idioms. Some examples include “it’s raining cats and dogs” when it
is raining hard, or “break a leg” when wishing someone good luck.
Example
This sentence uses an idiom to make it more interesting:
There’s a supermarket and a pharmacy in the mall, so if we go there, we can kill two
birds with one stone.
The idiom is a common way of saying that two tasks can be completed in the same
amount of time or same place.
C. Proverb
A proverb is a short, commonplace saying that is universally understood in today’s
language and used to express general truths. “Don’t cry over spilt milk” is a popular
example. Most proverbs employ metaphors (e.g. the proverb about milk
isn’t literally about milk).
Example
This example uses a proverb to emphasize the situation:
I know you think you’re going to sell all of those cookies, but don’t count your
chickens before they hatch!
Here, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” means that you shouldn’t act like
something has happened before it actually does.
D. Simile
A simile is a very common figure of speech that uses the words “like” and “as” to
compare two things that are not related by definition. For example, “he is as tall as a
mountain,” doesn’t mean he was actually 1,000 feet tall, it just means he was really
tall.
Example
This example uses a simile for comparison:
The internet is like a window to the world—you can learn about everything online!
The common phrase “window to the world” refers to a hypothetical window that lets
you see the whole world from it. So, saying the internet is like a window to the world
implies that it lets you see anything and everything.
E. Oxymoron

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An oxymoron is when you use two words together that have contradictory meanings.
Some common examples include small crowd, definitely possible, old news, little
giant, and so on.
F. Metonym
A metonym is a word or phrase that is used to represent something related to bigger
meaning. For example, fleets are sometimes described as being “thirty sails strong,”
meaning thirty (curiously, this metonym survives in some places, even when the
ships in question are not sail-powered!) Similarly, the crew on board those ships may
be described as “hands” rather than people.
G. Irony
Irony is when a word or phrase’s literal meaning is the opposite of its figurative
meaning. Many times (but not always), irony is expressed with sarcasm (see Related
Terms). For example, maybe you eat a really bad cookie, and then say “Wow, that
was the best cookie I ever had”—of course, what you really mean is that it’s the
worst cookie you ever had, but being ironic actually emphasizes just how bad it was
Dialogue
Dialogue is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more
people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange.
Dialogue, when used as a literary technique, helps to advance the plot of a
narrative, as characters engage in dialogue to reveal plans of action and their inner
thoughts and emotions. Sometimes, authors show us a character's inner
dialogue where thoughts and feelings are revealed as the character has a
conversation with him or herself. Often, we read outer dialogue, which occurs
between two characters as spoken language.

Other literary devices:

(1) Hyperbole is a term for overstatement or exaggeration.
(2) Understatement is exactly the opposite of hyperbole, when the writer tries
to play down the significance, magnitude, or intensity of a situation or
event.
(3) Incongruity is a circumstance when something is out of proportion or
strange situations knit together.
(4) Irony is a position when there is “a gap between what is said and what is
meant” (woods, 2013).

Examples of Dialogue:

"Lisa," said Kyle, "I need help moving this box of toys for the garage sale. Will you
help me?"

42
"Sure!" Lisa put her book down and moved to lift one end of the box for her brother.
She glanced down into the box. "Hey!" she exclaimed. "You can't give away your
Harry Potter collection!"
"Well, I am not taking them to college with me." Kyle smiled at his little sister. "Do
you want them?"
"Yes!" Lisa smiled back. "I will read them all again, and it will remind me of how we
used to pretend to be Harry and Hermione."
"They are yours, Squirt." As Kyle smiled as his sister, he realized how much things
would change in the next few days.

Scene
A scene is where the place and time where the action of the literary and factual
narrative takes place.
The word ‘scene’ has multiple literary definitions. On one hand, it is ‘A place
or setting regarded as having a particular character or making a particular
impression.’ (OED). When we talk of a scene as a unit of story structure, a scene is
‘A sequence of continuous action in a play, film, opera, or book’ (OED). It’s also ‘A
representation of an incident, or the incident itself.’ (OED)

How do these definitions combine? Scenes, individual story units smaller than
chapters (but somewhat self-contained), show us sequences of actions and incidents
that reveal place and time, characters’ actions, reactions or dilemmas.

Scenes (in short fiction and novels, plays and films) serve several functions.
They:

 Move the story forward: They keep us engaged, asking ‘what happens

next?’
 Establish characters’ arcs or cause and effect. This links to the first point.
For example, a scene might begin with a character missing a train. As a
result, the character may be late for a meeting. The reader wonders what
impact this small misfortune will have
 Reveal consequences of earlier events. A subsequent scene following the
missed train, for example, might show the consequences for the character
when they are late for a crucial meeting
 Make a story easier to follow. Scenes chunk what could be a narrative mess
into digestible units of action and event. They allow us to play with how we
release information to the reader (for example, a scene resolving an earlier
subplot might only take place much later in a novel. As writers we can make
some plot gratification instant and some delayed)

43
 

44
 Let’s Practice!

Essay Analysis:

Read the Article written by Exie Abola. Then, extract and analyze each section
using the literary tools. After crafting your analysis posted in white cartolina,
write them in your notebook. Follow the format below.

Many Mansions
by Exie Abola

It probably was a small house, but size throws off a child. What seems
modest to an adult is extravagance to a little one. It was the world to me.

It certainly seemed ample then. There were three bedrooms, which we called
blue, green, and aircon. Children’s names, these; one bedroom was painted blue,
one green, and one had a new air-conditioner. I don’t remember what we called it
before the air-conditioner arrived, but it was yellow, with a parquet floor and a deep
dressing area. It was the room of my parents, which is why the new Sony color TV
and Betamax were there. The old TV was in the living room downstairs, a Zenith in a
large cabinet with doors that slid open. In front of it was a coffee table and the blue
sofa where Tito Bing, when he was visiting, would sit shirtless, leaving a deep,
sweaty impression on the vinyl.

My mother sent most of us to piano lessons, and soon enough, a piano took
its place in our living room. We went to a music studio in northeast Greenhills, a
short walk from the Greenhills shopping center. To us that whole complex was
simply Unimart, where my mother bought groceries; then came Virra Mall, a modern
marvel, not yet a seedy haven of smuggled goods. This was my small, well-traveled
universe: Ledesma Street to Unimart; further down Ortigas to Meralco, where my
father worked and where we played tennis on Sunday afternoons; and then on to
Ateneo, where I had studied since grade school.

San Juan seemed pretty much the whole city then, because even my relatives
were there. On M. Paterno Street, adjacent to Ledesma, lived Tito Pepot with my
father’s parents. Tito Tito and the Litonjuas lived in another part of Greenhills, with
Tita Letty and the Mendozas nearby on Mariano Marcos Street. Sundays we heard
mass in Mary the Queen, where I would marry my wife years later.

45
 The big round dining table was new, and I suppose like a lot of families, we
experienced that moment of bliss when, having changed from a long table to this
round one with a novelty called the lazy Susan, we were liberated from the forced
courtesies of asking people to pass this or that dish. I wonder though if something
was lost, if the convenience of just turning an inner platform set on marbles until
what you wanted was right in front of you did away with the learned cordiality, the
togetherness with one’s table mates that taught you the give and take of community.

There were orange glasses and a matching orange pitcher, and at meals
we’d have it and a blue one on the table. Tito Bing would pour orange juice into his
coffee, forgetting that the water was in the orange pitcher, the orange juice in the
blue one.

Ledesma Street was a short one, and quiet. Our house was unassuming,
with walls of a modest height and a green gate. The gate opened to a long three-car
garage. We’d play football there, and Bombit, the eldest, once fell on his wrist and
broke it. On birthdays there would be parties, with folding tables from one end to the
other, balloons, spaghetti, hotdogs, ice cream, and our painfully cute posing for
pictures.

Our next-door neighbor made coffins, or so they said. I don’t remember seeing any.
Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone in that tiny gray house on our left. My
mother says that some of the people there had gone insane. Somehow, coffin-
making and insanity come hand in hand, as we’ve learned from old horror movies.
                                   
In high school I discovered the perilous thrill of chasing after girls. Going to
soirées, meeting them, getting their phone numbers, calling them up – how crazy it
all was, to daydream an entire afternoon away, my books on the living room coffee
table, my head in the clouds. The studying could go to hell as my mind floated in its
hormone-induced bliss. It was a heady time, reveling in the rush of taking risks, then
wallowing in the crushing despair of rejection.

The Assumptionistas wouldn’t let you stay on the phone with them more than
fifteen minutes. The Scholasticans would talk for hours, and I loved that. Niña and I
would talk often, it would be daylight out, then it would be dark and I wouldn’t even
get up to turn on the lights, and we’d talk some more. But I should have seen how
that affair would turn out: she lived on Vito Cruz, way beyond my familiar orbit. At a
certain point, we saw each other at a volleyball game in La Salle Greenhill, then
asked "Was that you?" later in the evening when I called. When you don’t know what
each other looks like anymore, the courtship has officially failed.

Then we transferred. It was 1984, I was fifteen and finishing my second year in
high school. When we were about to leave, we felt the excitement of moving to a

46
new house, a bigger one, in a more upscale neighborhood. It meant good things that
we were moving up in the world.

Literary Tools Analysis

Type of mansion

Plot (synopsis)

(1) Conflict of the story

(2) Theme

(3) Characters of the Story

(4) Setting

47
 Let’s Do It!

A. Based on the 5 words below, create five sentences as an introduction in

creating a storyline. Share your output by writing it in your notebook.

Place: Circus
Character: Grandfather
Time: Morning
Activity: Walking
Mood: Sad

B. Read the paragraph carefully and identify the theme used. Write your answer
in your notebook.

One summer's day, a merry Grasshopper was dancing, singing and playing
his violin with all his heart. He saw an Ant passing by working hard to store food for
the winter. “Come and sing with me instead of working so hard,” said the
Grasshopper “Let’s have fun together.” “I must store food for the winter,” said the
Ant, “and I advise you to do the same.” “Don’t worry about winter, it’s still very far
away,” said the Grasshopper, laughing at him. But the Ant wouldn’t listen and
continued to work.
When winter came, the starving Grasshopper went to the Ant’s house and
humbly begged for something to eat. “If you had listened to my advice in the summer
you would not now be in need,” said the Ant. “I’m afraid you will have to go without
supper,” and he closed the door.

48
 Let’s Answer This!

Multiple Choice. Choose the letter that best answers the given question. Write the
letter of your answer in your notebook.
1. Which part of the plot is the most intense?
a. Falling action
b. conflict
c. exposition
d. climax
2. A struggle between two or more opposing forces.
a. climax
b. conflict
c. character
d. chapter
3. What type of conflict is best shown here?
a. character vs. character
b. character vs. self
c. character vs. nature
d. character vs. society
4. The story's time and place is
a. tone
b. plot
c. setting
d. voice
5. The main idea, or message, in a literary work is the
a. setting
b. plot
c. tone
d. theme
6. Which part of the story is represented by this blue blob?
a. exposition
b. rising action
c. climax
d. resolution

49
7. Which part of the story is represented by this blue blob?
a. exposition
b. rising action
c. falling action
d. resolution

8. Which part of the story is represented by this blue blob?

a. climax
b. rising action
c. falling action
d. resolution

9. Which part of the story is represented by this blue blob?

a. climax
b. rising action
c. falling action
d. resolution

10. Which part of the story is represented by this blue blob?

a. climax
b. exposition
c. falling action
d. resolution
11. Character versus self is an __________ conflict
a. internal
b. external
12. In this element of plot the author introduces the characters and setting...
a. Resolution
b. Climax
c. Exposition
d. Rising Action 
13. The theme is a lesson learned; the moral of the story.
a. True
b. False

50
14. What type of conflict is best shown here...
a. character vs. character
b. character vs. self
c. character vs. nature
d. character vs. society
15. Which part of the plot creates tension and suspense?
a. rising action
b. climax
c. falling action
d. resolution

Let’s Remember This!

Complete the paragraph with the necessary words or sentences that best describe
what you have learned from the discussion. Write your paragraph in your notebook.
Follow the format below.
I have learned that writing in Creative non-fiction

51
Let’s Practice/ What I can do (let’s do it)
Rubrics for grading/rating an essay
Tick the box that corresponds to the score of the essay

Criteria Masterfu Skilled Able Developin Novice Actual

l (4 Pts) (3 Pts) g (1 Pts) Score
(5 Pts) (2 Pts)
Outline, Focus,
Purpose, Thesis
(controlling idea)
5 pts
Ideas, support, &
development
(evidence)

5 pts

Structure,
organization

5 pts

Sentence
structure
(grammar)

5 pts

Vocabulary and
word usage

5 pts

Total Score 25
pts

52
REFERENCES:
Book
Sygaco, Sonia B. (2017). Writing Techniques in Creative Nonfiction. Great Books
Trading, 7B Cavite St. West Avenue, Quezon City, Phil.

Internet
https://literaryterms.net/plot/

https://literarydevices.net/characterization/

https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-point-of-view.html

https://www.thewritersforhire.com/finding-the-best-angle-for-your-nonfiction-book/

https://blog.reedsy.com/what-is-irony/

https://literaryterms.net/figures-of-speech/

https://www.softschools.com/examples/grammar/dialogue_examples/460/

https://www.nownovel.com/blog/how-to-write-a-novel-scene/

https://www.softschools.com/examples/grammar/dialogue_examples/460/

https://www.nownovel.com/blog/how-to-write-a-novel-scene/

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 LESSON 4

DRAFTING A SHORT PIECE USING ANY OF THE LITERARY

CONVENTION OF GENRE

Learning Competency 1:
Write a draft of a short piece on Nonfiction from various disciplines
Learning Objectives: at the end of this lesson, the learners are expected to:
1. Discuss what is non-fiction
2. Identify the essential genres of Nonfiction; and
3. Write a creative nonfiction piece about your everyday hero (someone in your
life who you consider a hero).

Let’s Answer This!

Instructions: Read and analyze the items below before each number. Write the letter
that corresponds to the best answer.

1. Which of the following is an example of a work classified as Creative Nonfiction?

a. Autobiography b. Memoir c. Personal Narrative d. all of the foregoing

2. Which of the following is NOT TRUE about biography?

a. A written history of a person’s life
b. An account of the story of a real person’s life that is written by another
person
c. It is about the life of a person narrated by himself or herself
d. None of the above

54
3. It is any work drawn from the imagination of the writer.
a. Essay b. fiction c. novel d. short story

4. It is the most popular form of literature which is classified as a prose composition

which attempts to explain or clear up an idea, perception, or Point of view.
a. Editorial b. essay c. fiction d. research report
b.
5. In the line, the child is the father of the man, what figure of speech employed?
a. Anaphora b. litotes c. paradox d. simile
b.
6. Which group of words exemplifies onomatopoeia as a sound device?
a. Hold, told, mold, gold c. Hiss, buzz, swoosh, boom
c. Wicked and wan d. die, sky, fly, pie

7. The line glowing color appear, appeals to the sense of __________.

a. Sight b. smell c. taste d. touch

8. This element makes the essay literary.

a. Theme and content c. language and style
b. Form and structure d. coherence and unity

9. This is also known as “character essay”.

a. Informal essay c. critical essay
b. Didactic essay d. biographical essay

10. Which is true about a short story and a novel?

a. These literary works are both classified as fictional works
b. Both are imaginative prose works
c. They differ from each other in length and complexity
d. All of the preceding

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 Let’s Move On!
Test I. put a check (/) mark that best answer the questions.
1. A story written about another person’s life, is what type of nonfiction?
a. Autobiography
b. Exposition
c. Informational Article
d. Biography
e. Essay
2. A story that just explains information on a topic is what kind of non-fiction?
a. Exposition
b. Informational Article
c. Biography
d. Essay
e. Autobiography
3. A story that explains someone’s opinion on a topic is what kind of non-fiction?
a. Autobiography
b. Exposition
c. Informational Article
d. Biography
e. Essay
4. A story that someone wrote about their life is what kind of non-fiction?
a. Autobiography
b. Exposition
c. Informational Article
d. Biography
e. Essay
5. A story about a person named John Jackson and what his life is about would be
what kind of non-fiction?
a. Autobiography
b. Exposition
c. Informational Article
d. Biography
e. Essay

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6. What kind of non-fiction do most people read daily in the newspaper?
a. Autobiography
b. Exposition
c. Informational Article
d. Biography
e. Essay
7. Before you write non-fiction what do you need to do?
a. Read a good book
b. Eat a good lunch
c. Research your topic
d. Take a test
8. True or false: Informational articles contain opinion
a. True
b. False
9. What type of non-fiction would be describing a historic event?
a. Autobiography
b. Exposition
c. Informational Article
d. Biography
e. Essay
10. A diary is what type of non-fiction?
a. Autobiography
b. Exposition
c. Informational Article
d. Biography
e. Essay

What is Fiction and Creative Nonfiction?

A work of fiction is created in the imagination of its author. The author invents
the story and makes up the characters, the plot or storyline, the dialogue and
sometimes even the setting. A fictional work does not claim to tell a true story.
Instead, it immerses us in experiences that we may never have in real life,
introduces us to types of people we may never otherwise meet and takes us to
places we may never visit in any other way. Fiction can inspire us, intrigue us, scare

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us and engage us in new ideas. It can help us see ourselves and our world in new
and interesting ways. What's more, it's often just plain fun!
Creative nonfiction weaves the marginal boundary of literary art such as
fiction and nonfiction (covering and writing journalism, statistical, the essay, and
many others). Creative nonfiction then is the emphasis of truthful writing using the
character, setting, plot, conflict, and theme of the literary devices making it creatively
challenging.
In writing creative nonfiction, it should include precise and well-researched
information, should stir the interest of the reader to continue evaluating the storyline,
and provides artistry in the storytelling of truthful events. Types of creative nonfiction
include autobiography/biography, literary journalism or reportage, a blog may
feature travelogue, reflection essays, personal narratives or memoir, flash
essay, and testimonia.
Understanding Various Forms and Types of Creative Nonfiction
Creative Nonfiction (CN) includes different types of writing such as food, travel,
memoir, personal, reflective essays, and other hybridized types. It employs the
literary techniques to achieve elegance in the language, character, and make the
story heartwarming and nearer to the readers. It seeks closer to the truth as it
continues to provide the human aspects of triumphs and tragedies. Although creative
nonfiction may look poetic or crafted, it still illustrates creativity in weaving all the
details together. Writing for creative nonfiction makes you uncovered as you
continue to reveal all what you have in life.
Autobiography is a story of a person’s life in a specific moment in time that is
told by the person himself or herself. Thus, it is always told in the first-person point of
view since it is a story reshaped by reminiscing memories. Autobiography can be
subjected to truthfulness because of misleading or incorrect information provided.
Biographies are written in the third person about someone other than the author.
It may profile subjects both living and dead. There are four shorter types of
autobiography.
(1) Journals are daily written personal accounts, observations, experiences but
not emotional.
(2) Diaries are emotional accounts and personal experiences of the writer.
(3) Letters are written messages addressed to a particular person, organization,
or institution.
(4) Memoirs are narrower in focus, carrying memories, feelings, and emotions of
the writer.

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Sample of Biography:

JOSE GARCIA VILLA

Poet, critic, short story writer, and painter, Jose
Garcia Villa was a consummate artist in poetry and in
person as well. At parties given him by friends and
admirers whenever he came home for a brief visit, things
memorable usually happened. Take that scene many
years ago at the home of the late Federico Mangahas, a
close friend of Villa's. The poet, resplendent in his shiny
attire, his belt an ordinary knotted cow's rope, stood at a
corner talking with a young
woman. Someone in the crowd remarked: "What's the idea wearing a belt like that?"
No answer. Only the faint laughter of a woman was heard. Or was it a giggle
perhaps? Then there was one evening, with few people around, when he sat down
Buddha-like on a semi-marble bench under Dalupan Hall at UE waiting for
somebody. That was the year he came home from America to receive a doctor's
degree, honoris causa, from FEU. Somebody asked: "What are you doing?" He
looked up slowly and answered bemused: "I am just catching up trying to be
immoral." Sounded something like that. There was only murmuring among the
crowd. They were not sure whether the man was joking or serious. They were awed
to learn that he was the famed Jose Garcia Villa. What did the people remember?
The Buddha-like posture? Or what he said? That was Villa the artist. There's
something about his person or what he does or says that makes people gravitate
toward him. Stare at him or listen to him.
Villa is the undisputed Filipino supremo of the practitioners of the "artsakists."
His followers have diminished in number but are still considerable.
Villa was born in Singalong, Manila, on 05 August 1908. His parents were
Simeon Villa, personal physician of revolutionary general Emilio Aguinaldo, and Guia
Garcia. He graduated from the UP High School in 1925 and enrolled in the pre-med
course. He didn't enjoy working on cadavers and so he switched to pre-law, which
he didn't like either. A short biography prepared by the Foreign Service Institute said
Villa was first interested in painting but turned to writing after reading Sherwood
Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio."
Meanwhile, he devoted a good part of his time writing short stories and
poems. Soon he started exerting his leadership among the UP writers. His ideas on
literature were provocative. He stirred strong feelings. He was thought too
individualistic. He published his series of erotic poems, "Man Songs" in 1929. It was
too bold for the staid UP administrators, who summarily suspended Villa from the

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university. He was even fined P70 for "obscenity" by the Manila Court of First
Instance.
With the P1,000 he won as a prize from the Philippines Free Press for his
"Mir-i-Nisa," adjudged the best short story that year (1929), he migrated to the
United States. He enrolled at the University of New Mexico where he edited and
published a mimeographed literary magazine he founded: Clay. Several young
American writers who eventually became famous contributed. Villa wrote several
short stories published in prestigious American magazines and anthologies.
Here is a partial list of his published books:
Philippine Short Stories, best 25 stories of 1928 (1929)
Footnote to Youth, short stories (1933)
Poems (1941)
Have Come Am Here, poems ((1941)
Selected Poems and New (1942)
A Doveglion Book of Philippine Poetry (1962)
Through the sponsorship of Conrad Aiken, noted American poet and critic, Villa was
granted the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing. He was also awarded
$1,000 for "outstanding work in American literature." He won first prize in poetry at
the UP Golden Jubilee Literary Contests (1958) and was conferred the degree
Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, by FEU (1959); the Pro Patria Award for
literature (1961); Heritage Awards for literature, for poetry and short stories (1962);
and National Artist Award for Literature (1973).
On 07 February 1997, Jose Garcia Villa died at a New York hospital, two days after
he was found unconscious in his apartment. He was 88.
The Department of Foreign Affairs said Villa, popularly known as the "comma poet,"
died at 12:37 a.m. (New York time) of "cerebral stroke and multilobar pneumonia" at
the St. Vincent Hospital in Greenwich.
He is survived by his two sons, Randy and Lance, and three grandchildren.
Interment was scheduled on Feb. 10 in New York, the DFA said. It added that Villa
had expressed the wish to be buried wearing a barong. Though he lived in New York
for 67 years, he remained happily a Filipino citizen.

Sample of Autobiography
My name is Amanda L. Winter. I was born on 17 March, 1983 in Lexington,
Kentucky, where I lived until the time I went to college in another state. I’m the fourth
child and the only girl in a family of five. My father, Mr. Paul Winter is a retired
physician and he currently runs a drug store within the city.

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 My mother, Mrs. Beverly Winter was a registered nurse working for various
medical institutions across the state, until she decided to retire in 2010. Nowadays,
she helps dad run the drug store. I went to school in Dixie School and Paul
Laurence, where I completed my elementary and high school education respectively.
Then, I went to Kansas University, where I did my under graduate degree in
Journalism.
Growing up around four brothers was not easy, considering the fact that I am
a girl. With all the masculinity in the house, there was a lot of competition and rivalry.
I had to be tough as my brothers or I would have been toppled by their naturally
aggressive nature. Not that we were a dysfunctional family, it was just normal sibling
rivalry and it turned to be of benefit to me.
Since I was the youngest and a girl, I was bound to be at the bottom of the
totem pole in everything. So, I had to be equally tough to fight for whatever was
rightfully mine. As a result, I turned out to be a tomboy and also built a reputation as
a no nonsense girl. Furthermore, I had older brothers to protect me in case of a
dispute.
I believe I adopted both my parents’ brilliant brains, because I was always the
best students academically. However, my abilities were not limited to the classroom
alone. I also excelled in sports. In high school, I was arguably the best female
sportsperson in outdoor games, especially in athletics and volleyball.
I have many accolades to my name, however the one that stands out was in
my second year in high school. Representing our school in short races, I went to the
state competition where I emerged third overall. I was not fortunate enough to win it,
but it was an eye opener for me to strive for greatness in life. Fortunate for me, I won
the best sportsperson award that year at our school’s award giving ceremony.
While I was forging a name for myself in the academic and sports circles, my
social life was in a really bad state. My tomboy look was making it hard for me to
coexist well with either of the sexes. The girls were scared of my tough persona,
while the boys felt intimidated by my confidence and competitive nature.
My wardrobe was full of my brothers’ clothes that they had outgrown. All the
girlish clothes my mother bought for me, I had them piled in the closet and
completely forgot about them. When we went to the stores to buy clothes, I would be
with my brothers at the boys’ section. This disheartened my mother and she tried to
advise me out of it, but I was just too adamant. Eventually, she accepted the way I
was.
However, something happened in my life that sent me reeling back to the
foundations of my femininity. It happened during my senior year in high school. It
was the prom week and everyone was geared towards the most important night of
their high school life. Love was in the air. Young men were gathering courage to

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approach girls they liked, while girls were torn apart whether to accept or reject their
proposals.
All the girls had prom dates, except me. No one approached me or even
mastered the courage to look my way. It was one of the worst days of my life. I spent
the night with my mother watching my favorite movie to raise my spirits up. As a
result, I decided to embrace my feminine side. I got rid of all the male clothes,
started wearing dresses and released my hair. My mum really came to my aid at this
point in my life and although it was hard at first, I got used to the idea of wearing
dresses ad heels.
So, I began my college studies with a new form of rejuvenation in life. I
decided to pursue my college education far away from my hometown, because of
the misconceptions that I had been associated with for so long. I wanted to pursue
journalism as a career, because I understood the challenges and opportunities it
would expose me to and I love challenges.
I have always wanted to travel the world and I knew a career in journalism
would offer me that. With a 3.5 GPA, I secured a spot at Kansas University. During
the first year of study, I met the love of my life Ken Rodgers (not the singer, although
he has the same deep baritone voice) and everything as they say is history.
After graduation in 2006, I interned with the Kansas City Star for six months. I
then worked as a correspondent journalist with the Kansas City Globe Newspaper
for a year. We moved to Atlanta with my husband, after I secured a writing job with
the Daily Report for a year. At the time, he had a fitness vlog, where he gave daily
workout routines and healthy recipes to his clients. Therefore, moving from state to
state did not interfere with his line of work.
All he needed was a camera and an internet connection. My biggest break
came when I was hired by the LA Times. The pay was good, I travelled around the
world and each day was exciting in its own unique way and offered new
opportunities. Unfortunately, the job was too demanding and more times than not I
was away from my husband. I quite in 2011, after two years with the newspaper
giants.
I had not quite decided what I wanted to do with my life, so I worked as a
freelance journalist for a Canadian media firm. My job was basically to capture hot
showbiz news in Hollywood. It was an exciting job checking into the fabulous lives of
celebrities. I had no alternative, but to quit this job also when my first pregnancy was
due. It marked the last job of my professional career.
I decided to be a fulltime mum to my three lovely kids, Mathew, Sally and Luke.
To put my writing abilities into use, I became a permanent freelancer for various
blogs and websites. I have always thought of writing a book and I believe this is the
right time. The kids spend all the day at school and I have all the day by myself. I

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have not decided which way to go with the book, however I’m thinking in the lines of
romance and a bit of suspense and action.

Literary Journalism or Reportage is a precise, well-researched report of which

a reporter follows a topic, subject, or theme for a long period of time and then
provides a personal angle on it.

Sample of Literary Article:

GHOST BOAT  BY ERIC REIDY FOR MEDIUM 

This is an open investigation about the mysterious disappearance of 243

refugees in the Mediterranean ocean. The article is written in ten parts with no
definitive answer. It’s incredibly heartbreaking, but an amazing piece of journalism as
so many people – experts, students, amateurs – came together to find answers.
It also shows that, when it comes to refugees, people just don’t care and seem to
value one life over another.

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 Personal Narratives are taken from real life situations where the writer depicts
vividly the event, incident, or experience. It creates a dramatic effect to the readers
by making readers’ laugh, be frightened, or make them feel at the edge of their
seats.
Sample of Personal Narratives:
Swimming Distance
“Jenny, do I really have to swim this? The distance is so long, and I don’t
want to do two laps of butterfly! In the first event when I did butterfly, I choked on
water!” I complained on a sun-drenched day.
I was at Petaluma High School, standing next to my coach, Jenny. It was my
first swim meet, and I was having a pleasant time. Something was bothering me,
though. You could blame it all on the next event coming up. I was not looking
forward to it one bit. I had done fairly well in my previous events; however, I was
edgy and nervous for this one. This was a 200-yard Independent Medley. It was a
long distance because it included eight laps of four different strokes.
“Next event, 200 I.M. Girls, ages 11 to 12s,” Coach Patrick called through the
speakers. He was the announcer for today, and his voice sounded different through
the intercom speakers.
“Come on; you can do it! Go! Go! Go!” Jenny urged as I ran over to get ready.
“I just know you can!” I heard her say.
This was it, the last event of today’s swim meet.
“Swimmers, step up,” called Patrick. He waited until the six swimmers walked
up to their diving blocks. Quiver, wobble, shake, went my legs. Oh dear, I thought in
my head as I waited.
It was only about five seconds before my head would touch the cool water,
but five seconds felt long. The swimmers bent down and held the edge of the diving
blocks. I guess I looked so ready and professional-like on the diving block, but inside
my stomach was on the world’s biggest rollercoaster and my heart was the one who
wanted to jump out into the pool. The water smiled gleefully at me. Come on, come
on, it seemed to muse.
Beep! The buzzer went off, and everybody plunged into the shallow, still
water, sending it into a million ripples and crinkles. It felt good, and I relaxed for a
split second, but then remembered that this was a 200-yard medley. I started kicking
and soon emerged out of the silky water.
Start with the butterfly stroke, I told myself going through the order again in
my head as I swam. I pulled my arms back and did a stroke. Again, again, and
again. I hoped not to choke on water this time. Soon the wall was in front of me. I
turned and kicked off, starting my next lap of this stroke.

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 Next up, backstroke, I thought. On my backstroke start, I got water up my
nose, probably gallons of it. Gagging, I resurfaced. At the flags, I counted five
strokes, and then did a flip turn. More water ran up my nose. It felt like a hundred
needles touching it.
When I pushed off the wall for the breaststroke laps, my legs were stones,
wanting to sink lower and lower. I needed to catch my breath. But I can’t stop. Keep
going! I thought about what Jenny had said. I know you can, I know you can.
Before long, I was approaching the wall for my finish. I heard a swimmer
coming up behind me, but I wanted to get there first.
Kick, stroke, kick, stroke. We swimmers were all like sharks of the same
species who wanted the prey first. I could hear everybody speeding up.
I touched the wall, mouth full of water. I looked up and climbed out of the pool.
People cheered. I never thought I’d be able to do it. Sure I was trying to catch my
breath and my legs were Jell-O, but I swam it. I swam 200 yards! I did it and got
second place. Now I felt strong and confident. Thank you Jenny, my mind said,
wishing Jenny would get the message.

Memoir is a record of facts and events concerning a particular subject or period

usually written from the writer’s personal knowledge, experience, and observations.
Sample of a Memoir:

Tarlac Dike

by Kerima Polotan

The Tarlac Dike that is reported to have cracked and sent was the dike of my
childhood. Many years ago I lived in Tarlac, in a house off Tañedo Street whose
kitchen over-looked that dike. It stretched from one end of town, from the railroad
station all the way to Agana Bridge, and the dike was what I took to Tarlac High.
People lived in crude little huts huddled close to the wall, on the land side, and from
the dike as I walked by; I could look into their lives.

The dike curves ever so slightly in my memory, as though describing the arc
of a slow ball. It was made of cement and had steps on either side, ever so often
along the way. You could walk up to the ledge and walk into the river if you wished,
but the river was not the fearsome one reported today but a friendly, familiar one in
which the debris of living floated – old chairs, dead pigs, empty sardine cans.

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 It never flooded in the years I lived there but the waters rose to the ledge
when it rained, lapping against the wall. In summer the river behind my house
disappeared, and it as the unending puzzle of my young life where it went because
then in summer the riverbed dried up so completely that we could cross it, my friend
and I, balancing ourselves on huge stones that the June rains hid, on our way to the
barrios across, where the fruit trees waited our plunder. And such plunder it was!
Guavas, unripe mangoes, chicos, the fruits of childhood haunt the periphery of the
tongue no matter how far one has gone and what diverse tables one has sat at.

I had a good friend then who would later become one of the richest women in
the province (or so I’m told): but I done suppose she cares to remember the nipa hut
she used to live in the horse that pulled the rig which was the source of their
livelihood. I remember helping her walk their horse occasionally – a privilege, I
thought because it was a handsome animal. A “calesa” ride was five centavos was
all I had to live on every day, I took the dike instead, saving money for a slice of cake
at recess.

It was a cool damp walk in the morning on the dike if all one thought was
getting in school, you could reach the back of the trade school building in ten
minutes, walk down the steps, cross Romulo Boulevard, and be in time for the  flag
ceremony. But there were diversions to see- life stirring in the dark interiors of the
dike houses, breakfast being set, children hushed, a wife nagging, a husband
scratching himself in the window, clothes hung out dry, flower pots watered, detours
of the imagination that help the passerby and delayed him.

But the walk in the afternoon was the best part of all. We dragged our wooden
clogs and our school bags, taking our time, my friends and I, thinking of home and
supper. Along the dike the mothers called to their children; the houses sprang alive
with kerosene lamps. The smell of the rivers would come up to us and we would look
across it to the bank, talking of approaching summer, planning forays to melon
patches.

On clear nights the river would glisten, one huge sheet of dark glass from our
kitchen window. My friends has gone on to wealth and status, not too easily
accessible to people these days but I do enough remembering for the two of us I
suppose we weather everything – I have survived her success without envy and my
reminiscences must leave her untouched. Only the wall two high school girls had
thought would last a hundred years has crumbled a casualty of government neglect
of shortsightedness.

But my mind never let go. The dike the papers say has given way, stands
stubbornly in my memory, a sweep of cement and sand and the paucity my
children’s lives includes the absence of such memory of their lives.

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 Travelogue embraces the personal accounts of a writer on travel as he or she
evaluates the food, hotels, restaurants, and best sites to visit. A travelogue can be
shown through a magazine, website, television or film. It also highlights affordable
rates as well as expensive hangouts for tourists.

Sample of a Travelogue:
Lyon: The City of Two Rivers

Although Lyon has a population estimated at 484,000, you would never call it
crowded. Lyon is considered to be the most comfortable city in France and, in my
opinion, one of the best cities on the planet.

It is situated at the confluence of Rhône and Saône rivers. Somehow, the city
reflects the spirit of rivers ― calm and fascinating. There is no rush of modern life
like in Paris, no salty sea air of Marseille, and no golden sand of the French Riviera.
And, still, there is something magnificent in Lyon’s little streets, fancy houses, and
green hills. The magic of the city’s soothing life rhythm attracts tourists from all over
the world.

I remember Lyon as a city of bridges and bikes. By the way, a bike is a great
alternative to walking around. You can better sense the atmosphere of the winding
streets and visit more interesting places while riding a bike.

Cycling transport is very popular in Western Europe. Locals prefer riding

bikes to driving cars. There are cycle tracks everywhere, and you can easily find
bicycle parking. Moreover, the self-service bike rental Velo’V has more than 300
stations in Lyon, where you can rent a bike and not say a word in French! All you
need is your credit card and 150 euros as a deposit.

Don’t forget to walk along the Rhône river bank. It is an amazing location and
a favorite place in Lyon both for tourists and locals. The river crosses the whole city,
so you don’t have to spend much time searching. The river bank serves as a place
for picnics and jogging. At night, you can enjoy a beautiful view: the banks of Rhône
shine with the multicolored lights, and their shine reflects on the water surface.
During the daytime, you can simply sit on one of the numerous benches and
meditate. Although the stone benches are not very comfortable in winter, their cool
surface is utterly attractive in summer. During the warm season, a boat tour is also
highly recommended. In such manner, you will be able to see another side of Lyon.

In general, I recommend you to visit Lyon in the summer. As for me, green
hills and flowing water look much better than ice and white snow. Moreover, a cold

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won’t let you have long promenades, and Lyon is the most appropriate city for
wandering around aimlessly.

The next point in your to-do-in-Lyon list should be “to try French pastry.” Let
yourself be prodigal when it comes to French cuisine. All these palmiers, tarts,
madeleines, and éclairs are worth their weight in gold. If you have no idea about the
desserts that I’ve named above, don’t worry. The French love talking about food
(and not only about food). Locals will be glad to explain to you the difference
between profiterole and éclair and show the best local “patisserie” (bakery that
specializes in sweets and pastries). You should trust their choice, and don’t forget
about croissants!

One more exciting and magnificent thing about Lyon is the graceful
architecture. Of course, the whole city is an architectural masterpiece, especially the
part called “Old Lyon.” You will find no outside advertisement or neon signs here: the
citizens respect their cultural heritage and try to preserve everything in its original
form.

A genuine gem of the city is the Lyon Cathedral. This beautiful building
perfectly represents the Gothic architecture style: high towers, ribbed vaults, and
pointed arches. It is listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The internal
decoration is even more impressive than the façade. Giant stained-glass windows
and columns take the breath away!

In my opinion, Lyon is a perfect place not only for a one-day visit but also for a
long stay. If you need a break from the crowded subway or filthy city air, Lyon should
be number one in your travel list!

Reflection Essay examines a writer’s perspectives in life by allowing the author

to introspect and ponder back if such situation created an impact on his/her life. It
challenges the writer to think critically by exploring personal thoughts, feelings, and
opinions on specific topic and subject.
Sample of a Reflective Essay
My Little Brother
In my short life, there are many experiences that could qualify as life-
changing. Every new experience was, at one time or another, the first experience.
For good or bad, each instance changed the course that my life has taken. But, the
most transformative experience was the birth of my youngest brother.
Joel is someone my parents often call a happy accident. At the time that my
mother became pregnant, I was 13, and my other brother, Jake, was 10. We were
what you would call a well-rounded, perfect family of four. We neatly fit into the

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perfect classification in nearly every way. We didn’t realize what we were missing
until the moment that my youngest brother first opened his striking blue eyes.
In truth, I resented the fact that I would be having another sibling. Nothing
needed to be added to our family, and my mother, already 38 at the time, was
considered high risk because of her age. The pregnancy itself was full of
complications that sent the straight course of my life into rollercoaster-like loops that
my 13-year-old mind had a hard time comprehending. But now, I can see how
forging through those loops helped me to roll with the punches that life inevitably
brings.
The day Joel was born, my mother took me with her to the hospital rather than
my father. It wasn’t a planned move, but Jake and my father were both feverish; I
was the next best alternative. Sitting with her through every contraction, I gained a
new respect for just how powerful and strong a woman could be in what might be
considered their weakest moment. Holding her hand and feeding her ice chips, I
gained a connection with my mother that I didn’t realize we were lacking.
The moment my new baby brother came into this world, I realized two things
nearly simultaneously. First, you don’t realize how much you need something until
it’s sitting in your lap. Second, my life after this moment would never be the same.
The moment he curled his chubby little finger around mine, I understood the words
“happy accident” completely. There are many different experiences in life that have
changed a part of me as a person. But, nothing so profoundly changed my views
and outlook on life like the birth of my youngest brother. Joel’s arrival was a life-
altering event that caused me to see the world through new eyes.
Flash Essay also known as flash literature, is brief creative writing, generally on
the order of between 500 and 1500 words. It's also an umbrella term that
encompasses various short format works such as prose poetry, short essays and
other works of creative fiction and nonfiction. The term flash implies fast, impromptu,
and short format. The term flash prose is generally used in the context of writing
competitions or other public exhibitions of creativity or skill with language such
as weblogs or non-journalistic writing in, for example, a daily, a journal or another
type of periodical.
Sample of a Flash Essay:
The “Wild Messenger” by Jennifer Holland
(Take “Wild Messengers” by Jennifer Holland, a post that appeared in
the  New York Times  “Opinionator” blog last November. “About a decade
ago,” Holland begins, “a brain tumor came to steal my mother away.)”
She recounts leaving the sickroom briefly for a drive on a wintry
Minnesota morning, when she saw “nine bald eagles along that stretch of
road” on “the ninth of February.” Then, almost as soon as Holland

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returned to the house, her mother died. “I’m not a religious person, not
even a particularly spiritual one,” she writes, adding:
That night, though, I couldn’t help but think that those birds were nature’s
messenger…. I can certainly imagine my mom, a true animal lover,
choosing majestic birds, their number matching the date (a little nudge to
see if I was paying attention), to prepare me and say her goodbye. When I
suspended my disbelief, it made perfect sense.
It’s a first-person story, including a vivid anecdote about the eagles. But
she goes on to weave in references to religious traditions that have
venerated animals as spirit messengers, touching on St. Francis, Native
American totems, even  Wild  by Cheryl Strayed. From her opening line,
Holland signals she’s looking back, pondering what it all means. She
questions, then whittles away.

Blog belongs to social networking service where it portrays an online

discussion among writers as they engage in an informal diary-method of presenting
their stories. Usually the posts are shown in reverse order so that the recent writings
appear first. Many blogs cover sports, music, art, videos, lifestyle, politics, online
diaries, advertising, photography, cooking and among a multitude of topics. Readers
or followers may also comment and a lively interaction goes on.
Sample of a Blog:
A very well designed and slick blog that’s all about being your own boss and
creating your own wealth. It’s a blog with a very active podcast feed. Their podcasts
are insanely popular on iTunes, and no doubt they make a fair bit of money from
selling ad space on those podcasts. Podcasts is something to think about when
creating your blog as it could be a great monetization tool.

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 Testimonio Essays consist of a person’s written or spoken statement on a
product or experience. It can also be seen as a historical biography.
Different types of testimonials
You know that testimonials are powerful tools, but which type will work best for
sharing your customers’ success? There are so many ways to tell a customer’s
compelling story – deciding which one works best will be based on the collateral you
have to work with, as well as the unique way you want to share the success. Here
are some of the common types of testimonials to consider.

1. Quote testimonials

Perhaps the most beloved and common type, quote testimonials are direct words
from a customer who was satisfied with the products or services they received.

2. Peer testimonials
People tend to gravitate toward others who resemble themselves. This is
referred to as implicit egotism, and it’s why testimonials work peer. Basically, the
person giving the testimony is of similar status to the audience. This type usually
includes a visual in the form of a portrait.

 Drill down on your customer persona. Who are you specifically trying to

reach? Make sure it's crystal clear so you know whom to ask for testimonials.

 Ask for testimonials from people within your target market. These people
make up the peers of your customer persona (or maybe they even fit the bill
of your customer persona) and will attract more people like them because of
Implicit Egotism.

 Use customer details. Have the client or customer include personal details

about themselves that will allow the reader of the testimonial to identify with
them.

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 4 Types of social testimonials
A social testimonial can take various forms:

 Tweets about your products and services.

 Screenshots of your work posted on Instagram.

 Videos published on YouTube.

 Facebook posts on your page, the client’s page or within a group backing
your business.

The greatest testimonials are the ones you don’t ask for. This is where social
media testimonials come into play. It’s when customers volunteer to write about their
experience with your company via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or another social
media outlet. This type is ultra-organic and can add another layer of authenticity to
your reputation as a brand, as its social proof of your successes.

3. Video testimonials

Letting your clients speak their truth in a video is one of the most authentic
opportunities for a testimonial. This is something that’s very difficult to fake. Plus, this
type is visually stimulating, attention grabbing and can keep potential customers on
your page for a set amount of time.

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 Video testimonials are one of the most trustworthy forms of testimonial
because it’s difficult to fake one that looks authentic.

5. Interview testimonials
An interview with your client is another authentic route. It’s almost as if it’s a
hidden testimonial – if everything goes smoothly, nothing will be forced and the
interview will speak for itself. A text interview is an option, but a Q&A via video or
audio is more engaging and credible.

“Oberlo posted interviews on their blog with users who have been successful
while using the service. In the example below, they did a series of interviews with
some of their users about how they started out and how Oberlo paid a part in their
success.

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6. Influencer testimonial
Having a celebrity or social media influencer vouch for your brand is an
influencer testimonial, and it works because these individuals have a trusted name
and can help encourage other people to make decisions, thus leveraging them to
consider your products and services. Although, The Federal Trade Commission
requires all formal, paid influencer marketing campaigns to be disclosed.

Sample of a Testimonial Essay:

Testimonials from influencers are so effective because their names are highly
trusted and recognized. When you have a great review from an influencer, it shows
your audience that you too are trustworthy. After all, somebody that they recognize
and admire is endorsing your product, service, or work.

Content in Writing Creative Nonfiction

Writers can craft stories of their own or of others as long as they can provide
evidence of what really happened. This is important in case especially if the work will
be considered for publication. In the case of a personal account, the writer can start
from the beginning to the end of a particular situation or may write random of events
to create suspense at the end of the story.

For stories that are written by another writer, an interview is necessary.

Writers have a keen eye for details and the moments that have been extracted from
memory must be written down immediately. Conversations and poetry can be
included in the storytelling. Creative nonfiction also depicts showing the plot of the

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story rather than telling it through a dramatic, literary context of daily work, making it
delightful and meaningful.

Purpose for Writing Creative Nonfiction

The purpose of good writing is to express your feelings and not to impress,
bring the readers in a word adventure, and make your target audience agree what
you are talking about.

Writer-Based Purposes

Writing helps you shape ideas calve from real life experiences from merely
observing the surrounding events. The best writing exercise is to go outdoor (bus
stop, shopping mall, school, church, farm, airport lobby, and many other busy
places) and observe what is happening. You start to write down in an hour of the
things that transpired. This technique will surely help you to find your writing voice
and theme. Thus, writing is the highest among the other competencies such as
listening, speaking, and reading.

Choosing the Topic

If you have not been assigned a topic, then the whole world lies before you.
Sometimes that seems to make the task of starting even more intimidating. Actually,
this means that you are free to choose a topic of interest to you, which will often
make your essay a stronger one.

Define Your Purpose

The first thing you must do is to think about the purpose of the essay you
must write. Is your purpose to persuade people to believe as you do, to explain to
people how to complete a particular task, to educate people about some person,
place, thing or idea, or something else entirely? Whatever topic you choose must fit
that purpose.

Brainstorm Subjects of Interest

Once you have determined the purpose of your essay, write down some
subjects that interest you. No matter what the purpose of your essay is, an endless
number of topics will be suitable.

If you have trouble thinking of subjects, start by looking around you. Is there
anything in your surroundings that interests you? Think about your life. What
occupies most of your time? That might make for a good topic. Don't evaluate the
subjects yet; just write down anything that springs to mind.

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Evaluate Each Potential Topic

If you can think of at least a few topics that would be appropriate, you must
simply consider each one individually. Think about how you feel about that topic. If
you must educate, be sure it is a subject about which you are particularly well
informed. If you must persuade, be sure it is a subject about which you are at least
moderately passionate. Of course, the most important factor in choosing a topic is
the number of ideas you have about that topic.

Even if none of the subjects you thought of seem particularly appealing, try
just choosing one to work with. It may turn out to be a better topic than you at first
thought.

Here are a few guidelines to help you through the process:

1. Pick a topic that you are interested in. You will express yourself with more
clarity and insight if you are interested in the topic that you are writing about.
2. You should pick a topic based on the assigned texts that you understood.
While writing your essay, the majority of your energy will be focused on
explaining and supporting your individual perspective and thesis, so it is
important that you understand and feel comfortable talking about the primary
(and possibly secondary) material that will form the basis of your essay.

Select a topic that is challenging and thought provoking. You want to write about a
topic that is interesting to you. Your essay should reflect your own individual

3. and unique perspective on your chosen topic. It should not be a mere

restatement of the already existing academic ideas on the topic. So, you
should choose a topic that challenges you and allows you room to express
yourself in relation to the primary source text, and the secondary sources (if
they are applicable to your assignment).
4. Your topic should be specific enough that you can form an opinion about it,
but general enough that you can find enough information to support your
perspective and write a comprehensive and substantial essay.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement is the central idea of an essay, around which all other
ideas revolve. It is not just the most important idea; it also controls the essay by
determining what you should or should not include in your work. In one sentence, it
reveals and summarizes the arguments you intend to develop and defend.

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 The thesis statement reflects your purpose for writing. It is a constant
reminder of your main point and your stand, directing the entire flow of your writing.

It should be clear that the thesis statement is not the subject or topic itself, but
an interpretation of the topic. For example, if you were asked, to write an essay on
Noli Me tangere or Martial Law during President Marcos’ time, your thesis statement
would inform the reader of how you understand such a topic and what you deem to
be important or debatable about it.

Formulating a Thesis Statement

The thesis statement comes as a result of pre-writing. It is the product of

thinking about your ideas, seeking evidence, and looking for relationships between
these. At times, a potential thesis statement may become clear to you, especially if
an interesting angle on an issue catches your attention. Other times, you may ask
the following questions to help you find out a thesis statement:

 What main idea does most of my pre-writing support?

 What are the relationships that exist among my ideas?

 Which aspect of the topic seems to be given the most detail?

 Where does my stand seem to be the most consistent?

 What is the focus of the most interesting and significant points of my

pre-writing?

HERE ARE FIVE WAYS YOU CAN ORGANIZE IDEAS IN

YOUR WRITING AND BE CERTAIN THAT YOUR
READERS WILL GET IT:

1. Chronological Order

 What it is: This is a very common way to organize ideas as a writer or

storyteller that basically involves dishing out ideas or details in order of time,
first to last.
 When to use it: It is often used in expository writing (narrative that informs or
explains) – particularly when describing an event or series of events.
 Example: Think about when you were a kid and trying to explain to the
principal why you shouldn’t be left in detention until the end of time. Yup! You
described the events carefully and in order, because that’s how you make
sure your listener/reader understands the context and details of a narrative.

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  Transition words are important with every framework you use, to help your
readers navigate the process smoothly. In the chronological framework, some
commonly used transitional word and phrases are: first, then, next, last,
finally, etc.

2. Logical Order

 What it is: exactly what it sounds like. This framework is used to avoid

confusion in the reader.
 When to use it: You should organize ideas in this framework if your reader
needs to understand one point before being capable of understanding the
next.
 Example: Before talking to my students about Robert Frost’s famous poem
about decisions – The Road Not Taken – I told them a story about the biggest
decision I had made thus far in my life. They were able to take the logical leap
to understanding the true nature of the poem after hearing about my process
of decision making.

 Transition words and phrases: first you should understand, keep that in

mind while I explain, remember when I said.

3. Climactic Order

 What it is: In this framework, you generally keep the most important or
exciting point until the last of the piece.
 When to use it: Use this framework when you want to build excitement in a
piece or really emphasize one point as the pinnacle of the piece. It is often
used in persuasive essays (argument-winners, as my high school students
would have said), rankings or lists of things or illustration of a major problem
or usable solution.
 Example: When you are proving that your landlords need to fix the plumbing
in the bathroom, you may start with the incessant dripping tap, to the waste of
hot water in the leaking shower, and then landing on the punchline of the toilet
being blocked up (because we all know that is the WORST). Leaving that final
– and awful – point to resonate with your reader or listener will add more
weight to the other points, and keep the most important one at the forefront of
their mind.
 Transition Words: first of all, more importantly, just as importantly, finally.

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4. Random Order

 What it is: Just as it seems, this un-framework allows you to order your ideas
based on whim and whimsy more than any specific or logical progression.
 When to use it: Organize ideas in this way when your points all have equal
value or importance and can sit independently of one another in
understanding.
 Example: This one doesn’t happen often, but I’m using it today. All of these
ways to organize ideas have the same value and need no chronological or
logical order to make them clear, so TA DA! Random!
 Transition Words: Use association of ideas between points to transition from
one to the next, rather than stock transition terms.

5. Spatial Order

 What it is: Describing a scene as things are arranged in a physical space –

either by moving from one detail to the next, or as viewed from one stationary
vantage point.
 When to use it: This one is so cool! You can use it whenever you want your
readers to visualize a space, or if you want to evoke a scene using the
senses.
 Example: Use this arrangement to organize ideas when you are describing
your workspace, a product use or place description. It’s also a great way to
slow down a story when it’s getting extremely intense and you want to add a
little pacing for suspense: take a page to do a point-of-view description of the
setting in the moment.
 Transition words: just to the left/right, behind, between, across from, rising
out of, to the North/South etc., a little further, a few cm/inches/metres/feet
(basically all prepositions).

Developing the Theme Effectively

A theme in writing is the underlying idea behind an article or story that unifies
its words into a coherent whole. The theme has been called the “muscle” or the
"vehicle" of a story. A theme can be stated in one of two ways. It can be made
explicitly, usually in business correspondence, technical writing, and editorials. It can
also be made implicitly, usually in short stories, novels, and movie scripts. In this
case, the theme often emerges as the moral of the story. A strong, well-defined
theme enables the reader to see the deeper meaning in your story and the intention
behind your own motivation for writing it.

Techniques common to both forms of writing

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1. Understand the difference between "subject" and "theme." "Subject" is a
more general term than "theme." In non-fiction, the subject is a general topic
of interest, while in fiction, the subject is some aspect of the human condition
explored within the work. A theme is an explicit or implicit statement about the
subject.
2. Identify the purpose of your writing. The purpose behind your writing will
shape how you develop your theme in the piece. There are numerous
purposes as to why someone writes. Your writing may serve any of these
purposes (or any combination thereof):
3. Identify your audience. Understanding who your audience is lets you
determine which themes are appropriate to your audience. This will also help
you identify how best to present those themes to your audience. You can
determine what themes are appropriate to your audience by realistically
assessing how much knowledge and experience the audience has.
4. Consider the length of what you're writing. Longer works, such as novels
or memoirs, permit the inclusion of other themes subordinate to the primary
theme of your work. In contrast, shorter works, such as short stories or
editorials, usually have room to address only a single theme, although they
may give passing reference to supporting ideas.

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 Let’s Practice!

In the table below, examples of a general subject, specific topic, and thesis
statement are provided. Fill in the blanks by deriving other a general subject, specific
topic, or thesis statement depending on the given details.

General subject Specific topic Thesis statement

Being part of a high

school basketball team is
1.Sports a good training ground for
an athlete who wants to
play for a college
basketball team.

Facebook interactions Face- to- face

conversations are more
2. meaningful than
Facebook interactions
because they are more
personal.

3.Music Original Pilipino Music

(OPM)

4.Education The K to 12 program

The Metro Rail Transit 3

(MRT-3) fare hike is a
reasonable measure
5.Transportation because the additional
revenue generated can
go to the much- needed
improvement of the train’s
coaches.

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 Let’s Answer This!

Multiple Choice. Choose the letter that best answers the given question. Write the
letter of your answer in your notebook.

1. Autobiography is _____.
a. writer tells someone else's story c. writing that is not true
b. writer tells his own story d. gives a description of a topic

2. Nonfiction is ________.
a. reason for which the author writes c. writer tells his own story
b. writing that is true d. writer gives an explanation of ideas

3. When and where a story takes place is the ______ of a story.

a. Characters c. Point of View
b. Setting d. Climax

4. When and where a story takes place is the ______ of a story.

a. Characters c. Point of View
b. Setting d. Climax

5. Autobiography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a _________.

a.Fiction b. Non-Fiction

6. A story that is not true or is made up

a. nonfiction c. fiction
b. biography d. autobiography

7. Which of the following summaries could describe an autobiography?

a. famous writer's life told by another author
b. a famous basketball player's wife sharing memories of her late husband
c. Michael Jackson's mother describing his childhood
d. Helen Keller writing about her difficulties of being blind all her life

8. To support a main idea, writers often use __________________

a. persuasion to prove their point.
b. facts and details to help prove their point.
c. opinions and details to help prove their point.
d.. summaries of details to help prove their point

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9. Which of the following is NOT a question you should ask to find the main idea?
a. What is the author's purpose?
b. What point is the author trying to make?
c. What is the selection mainly about?
d. When did the write the selection?

10. Who is the narrator of an autobiography?

a. another author
b. unknown admirer
c. a relative
d. the author

Let’s Remember This!

Complete the paragraph with the necessary words or sentences that best describe
what you have learned from the discussion. Write your paragraph in your notebook.
Follow the format below.
I have learned that writing in Creative non-fiction

Congratulations!

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References:
Books
Sygaco, Sonia B. (2017). Writing Techniques in Creative Nonfiction. Great Books
Trading, 7B Cavite St. West Avenue, Quezon City, Phil.
Tiongson, Marella A., et.al (2017). Reading and Writing. First ed. published by Rex
Book store

Internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonfiction
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/learn-about-nonfiction#what-is-the-difference-
between-fiction-and-nonfiction
https://davehood59.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/writing-creative-nonfiction/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Garc%C3%ADa_Villa
http://pinoylit.webmanila.com/filipinowriters/garvilla.htm
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-literary-journalism-1691132
https://thebookcorps.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/9-amazing-literary-journal-articles/
https://www.scribd.com/doc/82835597/Tarlac-Dike-with-the-biography-of-Kerima-
Polotan-Tuvera
https://answershark.com/writing/creative-writing/travelogue/travelogue-sample-lyon-
the-city-of-two-rivers.html
https://examples.yourdictionary.com/reflective-essay-examples.html
http://talkingwriting.com/whats-flash-essay
https://makeawebsitehub.com/examples-of-blogs/
https://sumo.com/stories/testimonial-examples
https://stories-in-the-sand.blogspot.com/2007/04/tambuli-by-alvaro-l-martinez.html

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 LESSON 5

EVALUATING AND REVISING VARIOUS CREATIVE

NONFICTION TEXTS

Learning Objectives: At the end of this lesson, the learners are expected to:
1. Evaluate other’s draft based on:
a. clarity of idea
b. appropriate choice of literary element
c. appropriate use of the element
d. effective combination of the idea and the chosen literary element
2. Revise the draft of a short piece using any of the literary conventions of a
genre

Let’s Answer This!

Instruction: Write T if the statement is true and F if it is false. Write your answer in
your notebook.
1. What differentiates memoir from autobiography is that it deals with only a
slice, a portion or event in your life, rather than your whole life.
2. Diary follows a 3rd Person Point of View.
3. Memoir follows a 3rd Person Point of View.
4. An autobiography/biography most of the time is logically sequenced and
contains sequence words such as first, later, next, and finally.
5. An anecdote is an important part of a diary.
6. In writing a memoir, collapsing characters or events that are not important
to your stories theme will help you concentrate on the people and events that
are important.
7. Biography follows a 3rd Person Point of View.

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 8. Autobiography follows a 1st Person Point of View.
9. Diary writing should focus on a specific theme or lesson, and every
compelling story included in a good memoir should support that theme.
10. Memoir should include comparatives and superlatives to make writing
clearer.

After learning how to evaluate a nonfiction text through various literary

conventions or elements, it is just right that you start revising faulty or vague
nonfiction text considering the ways of evaluating a nonfiction text such as clarity of
idea, appropriate choice of literary element, appropriate use of the element and
effective combination of the idea and the chosen literary element.

In evaluating a nonfiction piece, the following are considered: clarity of idea,

appropriate choice of literary element, appropriate use of the element and effective
combination of the idea and the chosen literary element. The following are common
nonfiction texts (autobiography, biography, memoir and diary) and the ways of
creating and evaluating them.
Autobiography/Biography

A. Clarity of Idea
 The autobiography/biography should be logically sequenced and contains
sequence words such as first, later, next, and finally.
 It should begin with a strong lead that grabs readers’ attention, such as
something unexpected, a quote, dialogue, or a question.
 Should include comparatives and superlatives to make writing clearer
particularly for biographies.
 It should use descriptive words to tell about people, places, events, and
ideas.
 Should have strong ending that makes the reader think about the subject’s
life.

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 B. Appropriate Choice of Literary Element
 Elements of autobiography/biography includes: Characters, Setting,
Details, Chronological Order, Point of View (POV) and Author’s purpose.

C. Appropriate Use of the Element

 Characters should be well developed in detail and are true-to-life.
 Setting should be described vividly/clearly.
 Writers use objective details, subjective details and anecdotes.
o Objective details can be proved.
o Subjective details are based on personal feeling and opinions and
cannot be proved.
o Anecdotes are short, often humorous, stories that enliven writing and
illustrate a point.
 POV should be 1st Person (I, me, my, mine, us, we, our & ours) for
autobiography and 3rd Person (he, him, his, she, her, they, their & them)
for biography.
 Author’s purpose is the author’s reason for writing may it be to credit
people who influenced the subject, to explain or to justify the actions of the
subject, to give sense of the events in the lives of the subject and to
communicate an important personal statement about life.

D. Effective Combination of the Idea and the Chosen Literary Element

 Sequence words should be adhered with the chronology of the
autobiography/biography.
 Characters are given necessary descriptions as to their role on the
subject’s life and not their personal details irrelevant to the
autobiography/biography of the subject.
 Setting is given a thorough description on how it played an important role
or influence to the subject.
 Author’s purpose is well crafted based on the conditions mentioned above.

Memoir

A. Clarity of Idea
 What differentiates memoir from autobiography is that it deals with only a
slice, a portion or event in your life, rather than your whole life. Memoir is a
story within the story of your life. Stay focused on your chosen topic. Avoid
meandering off in another direction.
 Collapsing characters or events that are not important to your stories
theme will help you concentrate on the people and events that are
important.
 Who are you writing for? If it is family and friends then inside jokes and
vaguer references can be used. But, if you want anyone to be able to read

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  your memoir don’t refer to something they have no record of and will not
understand.

B. Appropriate Choice of Literary Element

 Elements of memoir includes: Theme, POV, Emotional beats, Supporting
stories, Personal style & Honesty.

C. Appropriate Use of the Element

 Theme - There must be one overall key point that is being conveyed to the
reader. Memoir writing should focus on a specific theme or lesson, and
every compelling story included in a good memoir should support that
theme.
 POV – Memoirs are in 1 st person POV (I, me, my, mine, us, we, our &
ours).
 Emotional beats – The best memoirs take the reader on an emotional
journey. Writing in the first-person point of view allows you to not only tell
your story but to relay the emotional impact of each specific memory.
Readers want to experience your emotional arc alongside your narrative
arc.
 Supporting stories - Writing memoirs involves plumbing the depths of your
real-life story and presenting those key events with honesty and
transparency. That’s why one of the essential elements of a memoir is
gathering supporting stories from other sources. If your memoir is a
coming of age story about your youth, it may be helpful to interview your
friends or family members who were around you at the time. You may find
that they remember events differently than you do or have additional
stories that can help flesh out your manuscript.
 Personal style - Writing memoirs is an opportunity to tell a story from your
life, but it’s also a chance to tell that story in a way that nobody else can.
That’s where your personal writing style comes in. Each page should be
filled with your own personality and point of view. Your style might be
tonal: When people read a David Sedaris memoir, they can be sure to
expect some of his signature humor. Your writing style might be more
formalistic in nature. Perhaps you present the events of your memoir out of
chronological order, relying on flashbacks and flash-forwards to destabilize
the reader. Only you know your personal style, and it should be present in
every line.
 Honesty - One of the defining characteristics of a memoir is brutal honesty.
Remember, readers pick up a memoir expecting a true story. Readers are
smart. They can tell if something in your memoir feels untrue. If they
suspect that the events in the memoir are false, it can permanently
damage the relationship between author and reader. That’s why you must
be willing to tell your story in an unflinching and honest way.

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 D. Effective Combination of the Idea and the Chosen Literary Element
 Theme should be well founded by providing details that will lead the
readers to what the theme really is.
 A good memoir could cause a contagion of feelings, from writer to reader,
when it is well-written.
 Readers would know when something seems off in a memoir so it’s better
to be honest and be straight to the point from start to finish to avoid your
memoir from being vague.
 Consistency of personal style throughout the entire memoir would leave a
good mark to a reader.

Diary

A. Clarity of Idea
 The entry should be inviting, thoroughly states the main events that have
been encountered by the character and includes several interesting
details.
 Details should be effectively placed in a logical order and the way they
should be presented follows 1st person point of view.

B. Appropriate Choice of Literary Element

 Elements/features of a diary includes: Heading, Body, Interference, POV,
Figure of Speech & Signature.

C. Appropriate Use of the Element

 Heading – date on which the diary entry is made.
 Body – should be detailed and comprehensive content.
 Interference – logical guess based on information from the text.
 POV – should be 1st POV, shown by the use of pronouns such as I and me
express the personal thoughts feelings of the writer.
 Figure of Speech – may include simile, ellipse or personification.
 Signature – needed for authenticity.

D. Effective Combination of the Idea and the Chosen Literary Element

 Date (heading) and signature should not be forgotten at all times to verify
the time period and authenticity of your diary.
 Using figure of speech is quite tricky so it should be well-thought of before
using it in a diary.
 A detailed and comprehensive content means free from vague and
irrelevant statements.

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 Let’s Do It!
Activity 5.1. AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Example:

Autobiography of a Student
My name is Elizabeth Austen. I was born on May 2, 2002 in Marseille, France. I was raised as a child of two
cultures: American and French. Although my parents were born in the USA, they left for Marseille after
their wedding because of career goals. My father is a translator, and my mother is an art consultant, so the
atmosphere of our house was creative and artistic.
It was difficult for me to make friends with French peers. That’s why I have always communicated with
adults who were my parents’ friends or colleagues. Since childhood, I have had a thirst for knowledge and
new discoveries, and elder friends were happy to share their memories and life experiences with a little,
curious girl.
I have a talent for learning languages and studying art. That’s not surprising taking into account my
environment. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I still store my notebooks as a
memory about my first drafts.
Later on, I understood that my heart belongs to art. I spent much time in my mother’s office listening to her
impromptu lectures about famous paintings. Her lessons along with her stories about the USA have inspired
me to go to the United States and attend the California College of the Arts to get a Bachelor of Fine Arts in
Art History.
My main belief in life is that everything should be in harmony. People have to keep balance in all spheres of
life: society, family, work, friendship, and others. Studying art is my personal way to keep balance. I’m
driven by my passion to visit all cities with a rich artistic history: Venice, Rome, London, San-Francisco,
Tokyo, and so many others. These journeys will not only improve my professional skills but also will help to
learn more about myself and people.
I believe that studying at the California College of the Arts will allow me to become a real professional with
a mature art taste and extensive knowledge of art history. In the future, I will follow my mother’s footsteps
in order to help people discover the beautiful world of art. If my career as an art consultant isn’t successful, I
will dedicate my life to teaching future generations of students and cultivating their love of fine arts.

1. Who are the characters?

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 Elizabeth Austen (subject), her father, her mother, elder friends

2. Where is the setting?

Marseille, France

Details:
Objective details (at least 2)

(1) Although my parents were born in the USA, they left for Marseille after
their wedding because of career goals. (2) My father is a translator, and my
mother is an art consultant.

Subjective details (at least 2)

(1) My main belief in life is that everything should be in harmony. (2) I believe
that studying at the California College of the Arts will allow me to become a
real professional with a mature art taste and extensive knowledge of art
history.

Anecdote:

None

3. Is the autobiography in chronological order? Show a brief chronology of the

subject’s life.

Yes. (1) Birth on May 2, 2002 (2) Childhood: a thirst for knowledge and new
discoveries (3) Teenage: dreamed of becoming a writer (4) pursuing
California College of the Arts.

4. What Point of View (POV) was used? Give the pronouns used in the
autobiography.

1st person. Pronouns used: my, I & me

5. Author’s purpose:

 Credited people who influenced the subject

 Explained or to justify the actions of the subject
 Gave sense of the events in the lives of the subject
 Communicated an important personal statement about life.

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Do this

My name is Maria Angelina Bacarella. I was born on March 7, 1995, in Tawas City, Michigan. My
parents are James and Michelle Bacarella, and I have three younger siblings, Sophia, Alex, and
Samuel. I attended Holy Family Catholic School in East Tawas from kindergarten until sixth grade.
While there I participated in band, choir, Girl Scouts, Council of Catholic Girls, volleyball, softball,
and basketball. I was on honor roll and received an academic achievement award. Attending a
catholic school helped me to grow academically, in my faith, and as a person, giving me high moral
standards. In seventh and eighth grade I attended Tawas Junior High. I was involved in volleyball,
basketball, softball, and Club PRIDE. I was on honor roll every semester, and received the
presidential academic award.
I currently attend Tawas High School. I am involved in Iosco Pride, Spanish club, liturgical dance,
youth group, Student Senate, volleyball, soccer, and National Honor Society. I currently have a 3.88
cumulative G.P.A. and am 8th in my class of 117. Though my school, I go to coop every day for two
hours in the 81st District court. While there I have learned many school that pertain to a future career
in law. I file papers, type bonds, and observe court. This has given me first-hand experience
identifying legal documents and understanding how to proceed in court.
I am very motivated to create the best possible future for myself, and have worked very hard to set
that up. I have been on the honor roll every marking period thus far in my high school career. I
received my academics and athletics varsity letters, an honors pass, the hustle award for volleyball,
and an academic achievement award. Some of my strengths include being a hard worker, dedicated,
self-motivated, and organized. My weaknesses are that sometimes I am overly ambitious and take on
too much at once, and that I tend to expect too much of others.
I have volunteered at local nursing homes, and for local churches. My favorite volunteer experience
has been helping out with vacation bible school through my church. Through this I am able to help
kids grow in their faith. Through Iosco PRIDE I am able to send a positive message in a fun way. I
love these because they allow me to be a positive role model for kids. I currently work at Chick’n
Dots Tiny Tots Boutique. My favorite thing about my job is that I get to work with children. I also
babysit on the weekends and in the summer.
Next year, I plan to attend Michigan State University. I hope to be involved in their college of social
sciences, James Madison College to gain my bachelor’s degree in International relations. During
college I hope to study abroad to assist in my learning other languages. After college I would like to
attend Michigan State University College of law. I hope to become an international lawyer someday,
working for a company like USAID. With this line of work, I would be able to travel and work on
projects to help people in other countries.
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1. Who are the characters?

2. Where is the setting?

Details:
Objective details (at least 2)

Subjective details (at least 2)

Anecdote:

3. Is the autobiography in chronological order? Show a brief chronology of the

subject’s life.

4. What Point of View (POV) was used? Give the pronouns used in the
autobiography.

5. Author’s purpose:

Credited people who influenced the subject

Explained or to justify the actions of the subject
Gave sense of the events in the lives of the subject
Communicated an important personal statement about life.

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Activity 5.2. MEMOIR
Example

JUST SWINGING - September 12, 2009 by 9CatsPerLife101

There’s something strange and magical about a swing set. As a child, I always loved to swing.
Nothing on the playground ever compared to the swings. Sometimes I would close my eyes and let
the cool breeze be my friend, seemingly helping me rise off the ground. And when I opened my
eyes, I would see that the swing had carried me far beyond the playground, far beyond the grove of
trees along the edge of the field, but I was never afraid. It was the only thing that could truly make
me forget life and simultaneously make me alive.
With time, though, I outgrew elementary school and moved on. By then swinging was a mere ghost
of a memory and was almost forgotten. Almost. The summer before high school, I revisited my old
playground. Like an abandoned house, it had all the nostalgic memories of a previous home, and
yet, I was drawn to only the swings. If there’s something strange and magical about a swing set, it’s
because it’s never empty for long. The air was still as I got on, the metal chains never made a sound.
Slowly, as I swung, I remembered, no, embraced. I embraced the cool wind on my face, the thrill of
being weightless, the knowledge of being too high for any trouble to reach. And I embraced what it
was like to be a child again. Sometimes I can still see that teenage girl on the deserted playground.
Just swinging.

1. What is the theme?

The comfort a simple swing can bring throughout a lifetime.

2. What Point of View (POV) was used? Give pronouns used in the autobiography.

1st Person POV. Pronouns: I, my, & me.

3. What is/are the emotion(s) portrayed by in the memoir?

Nostalgic feeling of carefree by forgetting everything and just immersing

oneself to the joy and comfort of just swinging.

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4. Any supporting stories? None

5. Any personal style? How?

Yes. The authors way of writing makes the readers feel the nostalgia and
depth feelings of her memory.

6. Does the author show honesty? How?

Yes. The memoir is convincing and relatable.

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Do This

Wall of Memories - August 1, 2012 by jmac1780

As I walk through the halls of where we used to play together, I see the old markings on the walls.
They remind me of how I would draw our family with a crayon on our wall of memories. I took a
different color each time, and everyday add something, like a family member we just found out
about, or a new picture I drew. The wall soon filled up over time, as I dipped your paw in paint and
my hand as well, and pressed them together, at the same time, right next to each other, on our wall of
memories. Mine was purple, yours was green.

I don’t recall what made me think you liked the color green. After all, weren’t cats colorblind? I
wasn’t sure, but I guess green was sort of your color. You had a green collar, a green toy, green this,
green that. And it was all by accident. Although, I’m sure there are no accidents when it comes to
that. But ever since that hand-printing day, I can’t remember a time when those two colors never
looked so perfect together. And the wall kept filling up, and filling up, with more memories to look
back on, and more promises to keep.

Promises? I don’t remember making any promises. But the promises we made were in each other’s
eyes, and in each other’s hearts. I looked at you, and you looked at me with those green, peaceful
eyes, and it seemed as though we promised to be together forever. The promises we made in our
hearts were for us only, to stay best friends. But after you left, those promises seemed to do nothing
but fade.

I remember the day you left very clearly. And boy, it was not pretty. I remember collapsing in tears,
screaming that they couldn’t take you away from me. Sobbing my heart out, only to face the reality
that there was nothing I could do. Time passed and I didn’t get any better. I hid my pain behind a
fake smile and shining eyes. Shining from tears. I wanted to die. I couldn’t imagine life without you,
and I wished for you to come back to me. I missed you terribly, and I couldn’t get you off my mind. I
wanted the best for you, but I wanted you with me. I saw you everywhere after that day. Everywhere
I went, there was a memory we shared on that couch, in that room, next to that wall, everywhere, and
anywhere. You were everywhere, and all I kept thinking of was what I had and lost. I kept walking
by our wall of memories, only to softly touch the markings, and break down in tears again. Every
time. I wanted you to come back. My sweetie. My first pet. My best friend.

I could spend hours and hours gazing at our wall of memories, like they were the stars in the night
sky. I could get lost in the thousands of memories we left there, until I finally rested my gaze on the
two small hand and paw prints, purple and green, and right next to each other. No matter what the
future held, that was one thing that could never be changed. Our promises on our wall of memories.

I love you Cricket <3

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1. What is the theme?

2. What Point of View (POV) was used? Give pronouns used in the autobiography.

3. What is/are the emotion(s) portrayed by in the memoir?

4. Any supporting stories? Give Brief details.

5. Any personal style? How?

6. Does the author show honesty? How?

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Activity 5.3. DIARY
Example

Friday – March 25, 2011, 10:00 AM

Dear Diary,
After I woke up this morning, I made the regrettable decision of waking up. I tried to go back to
sleep, but I could not even relax. Today was one of those days where either I get up, or I get up. I
then decided to go outside, but because it was raining, I got wet. I went back inside, felt tired enough
to go back to bed, but I still had to change out of my wet clothes. Then I got a phone call from you
know who. I got so excited that I didn’t care that I was naked, tired, and there was a puddle on the
floor. We are going on a date this Friday. I don’t know how I’m going to sleep. What am I going to
wear? :naked dance: :singing in the rain: oh diary, one day I’ll look back on this and say remember
when I didn’t pay attention to anything but the phone ringing. FINALLY!

1. Heading: Friday – March 25, 2011, 10:00 AM

2. Is the body detailed and comprehensive? Yes

3. Is there an interference made by the author? None

4. What Point of View (POV) was used? Give pronouns used in the autobiography.
1st Person POV. Pronouns: I & my.

5. Is there figure of speech used in the diary? None

6. Is there a signature? Yes

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Do This

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Dear Diary,

I woke up very late again because today is weekend. I ate lunch at home.
Then I had to go to Min Buri city. The reason I have to go there is my dad is building our new house
and he wanted to check something and prepared for the next step.
He wanted me to drive my care (actually, it's my mom's car, but she gives it to my brother and me but
my brother is in Bangkok for studying Thammasatt University. It's my chance to practice and use this
car but someone parked a care behind my car and I couldn't take it out of my parking lot. So I have to
drive my dad's car. It's a Camry and too big for me. I was very excited and everyone, too. It's not only
my dad and me but also my mom and Meet. (Can you remember her from the first page?) When we
reached there I ask Meet that did you scared of me driving? She answered "a little bit scared."
Hahaha. I didn't tell her that if my mom allows me to drive a car to school, she has to go with me. Ha!

After my dad finished checking the house, I drove home. And I asked my dad to comment on my
driving. He said good. I am very happy. I've been practicing driving for 6 months. And it's getting
better every month. YEAH!

Ps. I chat with my brother and I order him to buy me CD for me. Ha Ha!

1. Heading:

2. Is the body detailed and comprehensive?

3. Is there an interference made by the author?

4. What Point of View (POV) was used? Give pronouns used in the autobiography.

5. Is there figure of speech used in the diary?

6. Is there a signature?

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Activity 5.4. REVISE A FAULTY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Write your entry on your
notebook.

Me was born on a warm, sunny day in June 8 in Manila, Philippines. I still live in Manila,
Philippines and I go to school at Amparo High School. I live with my mom, Kate; my brother, Jake;
and my Aunt Molly. When I was born, my bother was fifteen-months-old and hid under the table
from me. Jake is a sweet kid and he would do anything for me, but like all brothers and sisters we
fight like cats and dogs. Sometimes when no one was around, Jake would come up to me and bite
my toes for no reason. I still love him but only because he is my brother.

I attended Amparo Elementary School, and there I also won a couple of awards: one for perfect
attendance and two for being named Student of the Year--one in sixth grade and the other in eighth
grade. I am now a senior at AmparoHigh School. I plan on finishing school and maybe going to a
community college. My name is Sally Friday. I started school when I was six-years-old. Then, I
went to kindergarten through fifth grade at Booker Elementary and while I was there, I won an
award for perfect attendance. I also won an award for honor roll all four terms.

Life to me means friends and family who can trust and who trusts you. I am pretty much on the
happy side of life, but like all teens I do I have my "days off." That means I do have some sad days
or depressed days. I have a few frinds here that sort of look out for me and when I am having a bad
day, I have someone here at school to talk to. I make my school days go by thinking of either the
next hour or what I will do when I get home or on the weekend. I'm not seeing anyone now but
when I did have a boyfriend, our favorite places to go were the movies and out to dinner. Sometimes
we went to the beach. Only once we went to an amusement park: Universal Studios. We were
together for twenty-nine days and then we broke-up; so no, I don't think it was forever.

The 2018 will make twenty years since me graduated from high school. I think I will probably be
still living here in Manila. I’m will be quite comfortable with my living situation, meaning that I
will be married to Paul Smith. We will have one child: Linda Treasa Smith, who at that point will be
three-years-old and a little devil. Paul is a sweet guy; he will do anything for anyone. He is six feet
tall and built well. He has baby blue eyes and blond hair. We will have been together for five years
and will be happy together--this is forever.

As I said in the beginning, I was born here in Florida and I've lived here my whole life. I would like
to see more of the Philippines but unfortunatly, I don't have any money to leave Florida to go
anywhere right now. I hope you have enjoyed reading my life story as much as I have enjoyed
writing it for you. Try to get as much as you can out of school; you're only there for twelve years
and when you graduate, you're home free. Here's a tip for you to live or try to live by: If you think
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it, it can be done.
 Activity 556. REVISE THIS MEMOIR. Write additional details that will support
this memoir. Write your entry on your notebook.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white
wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold
liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling
and began to be happy and to make plans.

Activity 5.6. REVISE A VAGUE DIARY. Write your entry on your notebook.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

When I went upstairs to class, Neat said to me "Mr. Robert is gone! Dead." I said "What!?" It's really,
really sad. I really don't want him going. He had not been to school for a long time and in hospital
sick or something like that. I'm very sad.

In last year, he liked to talk with I. I can remember one thing that he told mine. He asked how old I
am? And I said 15. Why you asked me? He said you are very young. Do you have any boyfriend and
I said no! I never want to. He said it's a good idea. You're right. Now, is the time for study and have
some fun with your friends. When you are grow up, you can do whatever you want, but remember
you cannot trust in every boy. And I can remember it clearly.

In the morning, all of the EP students and EP teachers were downstairs in front of the building and
Mr. Naha announced about Mr. Robert's profile and in that moment, he cried. WHAT!? Yeah! He
cried like he feel very sorry about that. I understand but he cried very hard and it's very funny (about
Mr. Naha) I laugh and I can't control laughing at Mr. Naha. Every student were very surprised and
me, too. Because we're never seen that before. One student said we forgot to record Mr. Naha crying.
I know it's very bad that I laughed at him when he fell very bad. But I can't control. I'M SORRY!

Ps. God bless Mr. Robert

Ps. And Mr. Evan, I hope you get well and come back soon!

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 Let’s Answer This!

ASSESSMENT
Instruction: Write T if the statement is true and F if it is false. Write your
answer in your notebook.
1. What differentiates autobiography from memoir is that it deals with only a
slice, a portion or event in your life, rather than your whole life.
2. Diary follows a 1st Person Point of View.
3. Memoir follows a 1st Person Point of View.
4. A memoir most of the time is logically sequenced and contains sequence
words such as first, later, next, and finally.
5. An anecdote can be a part of an autobiography.
6. In writing a diary, collapsing characters or events that are not important to
your stories theme will help you concentrate on the people and events that
are important.
7. Biography follows a 1st Person Point of View.
8. Autobiography follows a 3rd Person Point of View.
9. Memoir writing should focus on a specific theme or lesson, and every
compelling story included in a good memoir should support that theme.
10. Autobiography should include comparatives and superlatives to make writing
clearer.

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REFERENCES:
http://sumreena.tripod.com/autobiography.htm
https://targetstudy.com/languages/english/diary-writing.html
https://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?sp=yes&code=Q55AB8&
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/breaking-down-the-key-elements-of-a-
memoir#6-key-elements-of-a-memoir
https://networlding.com/elements-of-a-memoir/
https://www.5staressays.com/blog/autobiography-examples
https://www.freelancewriting.com/top10tips/10-tips-for-writing-a-memoir/
https://www.teenink.com/nonfiction/memoir/article/1039845/Styrofoam-Pills
https://www.teenink.com/nonfiction/memoir/article/132491/Just-Swinging
teenink.com/nonfiction/memoir/article/482610/Wall-Of-Memories
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-great-examples-of-short-diary-entries
http://www.autobiographyof.me/an_example.html

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Lesson 3
Pre Test Post Test (Assessment)
1. B 1. D 11. A
2. B 2. B 12. C
3. C 3. B 13. B
4. D 4. C 14. B
5. A 5. D 15. B
6. C 6. A
7. C 7. B
8. C 8. A
9. B 9. C
10. B 10. D

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Lesson 4
Let’s Answer This (Pretest) Let’s Move On
1. D 1.Biography
2. C 2.Informational Article
3. B 3.Exposition
4. A 4.Autobiography
5. B 5.Biography
6. C 6.Informational Article
7. A 7.Research your topic
8. D 8.True
9. D 9.Exposition
10. C 10.Autobiography
Let’s Practice
Answers will vary according to students’ opinion and concept
Post Test
1. B
2. B
3. B
4. B
5. B
6. C
7. D
8. B
9. B
10. D

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Lesson 5

WHAT I KNOW
1. T
2. F
3. F
4. T
5. F
6. T
7. T
8. T
9. F
10. F

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Office Address: Masterson Avenue, Upper Balulang, Zone 1, Cagayan de

Oro City, Cagayan de Oro, Lalawigan ng Misamis Oriental
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Email Address:

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