UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE BUCARAMANGA

LANGUAGE INSTITUTE
ENGLISH CLASS - STORY WRITING

Telling stories is common in any language. Think of all the situations in which you can tell a story:
Talking about your past to a friend.
Giving details about something that happened during a job interview, holidays, school,
university, a party, etc.
Relating information about your family to your classmates, teachers, friends.
Telling colleagues about what happened on a business trip, a summer excursion, a school trip, a
camp, etc.
In each of these situations - and many others - you provide information about something that
happened in the past. In order to help your audience understand, you need to link these ideas
together. One of the most important ways to link ideas is to sequence them. Sequencing refers to
the order in which events happened. These are some of the most common ways to sequence in
writing or speaking:

1. Beginning: 2. Continuing: 3. Interruptions / New 5. Ending:

Firstly, Then, Elements to the Story: Finally,
First of all, After that, Suddenly, In the end,
To start off with, Next, Unexpectedly, Eventually,
Initially, As soon as / When + full ————————— Lastly,
————————- clause, Examples: ———————-
Examples: ... but then Suddenly, a child Examples:
Firstly, I began my Immediately, burst into the room Finally, I flew to
education in —————————— with a note for Ms. London for my
London. Examples: Smith. meeting with Jack.
First of all, I opened Then, I started to get Unexpectedly, the In the end, he
the cupboard. worried. people in the room decided to
To start off with, we After that, we knew didn't agree with the postpone the
decided our that there would be no mayor. project.
destination was problem! Eventually, we
New York. Next, we decided on 4. Events Occurring at became tired and
Initially, I thought itour strategy. the Same Time returned home.
was a bad idea, ... As soon as we arrived, While / As + full clause Lastly, we felt we
we unpacked our bags. During + noun (noun had had enough
6. Vocabulary: We were sure clause) and went home.
Try to use a wide everything was ready, Examples:
range of words to but then we discovered While we were 7. Use synonyms:
make your story more some unexpected getting ready for the Finally if you need
interesting. problems. trip, Jennifer was more ideas just go to
Remember that you Immediately, I phoned making the this dictionary and
can "exaggerate" my friend Tom. reservations at the look for synonyms**
when you tell a story, travel agent's.
so instead of using During the meeting,
words like "nice" or Jack came over and
"bad", experiment asked me a few
with more interesting questions.
words, such as
"beautiful",
"fabulous",
"wonderful",
"horrible", "awful" or
"terrible".
*http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-synonyms/beautiful/forced