how to write a letter

Provide the context of the letter. Put all the information that the reader will want to know at the beginning of the letter, before you even begin to write the body. If you're writing to a close friend, you won't need much except the date, which will help your friend remember when it was received. If you're writing a business letter, on the other hand, the reader may not even know who wrote the letter (if an assistant threw the envelopes away before passing along the letters). The arrangement of this information depends on the type of letter you're writing, but as long as you provide it neatly and completely, you should be fine:


Your address, sometimes including contact information; some people prefer to write this out at the bottom of the letter, under the signature and printed name. This can also go at the top as a letterhead.
The recipient's name, address, contact information; in business letters, this can be referred to as the "inside address"; if you don't know the recipient's title (Ms., Mrs., Mr., or Dr.) on the side of caution--use Ms. or Dr. if you think it might apply;[1] use your country's address format; if the inside address is in another country, write that country's name in capital letters as the last line.
The date
A subject line, usually beginning with "Re:" (e.g. Re: Graduation application #4487)

2Start with a proper greeting. The opening should begin at the left side of the page, not the middle or up against the right side of the sheet. The most common opening is "Dear" followed by the person's first name and a comma. For a more casual greeting, you can write "Hello (name)," or "Hey (name)," but if the letter is formal, use the recipient's last name and a colon instead of a comma (e.g. "Dear Mr. Johnson:". Sometimes, if you don't know the recipient's name, you can write "To Whom It May Concern:" If you don't know the person's gender, write out his or her full name to avoid using “Mr.” or “Ms.” (e.g. Dear Ashley Johnson:).
3Write an opening paragraph. Tailor your opening to the recipient. For example, if the letter is casual, you can begin with, "What's up?" or "How's it going?" Otherwise, a simple "How are you?" is fine. If it is a business letter, be direct about why you are writing the letter. Summarize your intentions and be sure to write clearly so that the reader will understand you.
4Construct the body of the letter. This is the part that will really be unique to each letter. Most business letters should be no more than two pages long, but casual letters can be as long or as short as you want them to be. No matter who the recipient is, try not to ramble. Keep each paragraph engaging.
5Use the closing paragraph to indicate the type of response you are seeking. If you would like a letter in return, you can write, "Please write when you have a chance" or, if you prefer a phone call/email, write "Call me soon." or "Email me some time".
6Include a closing such as "Love always" ,"Cheers", "Sincerely", "Talk soon", or "Look forward to seeing you soon". Again, choose your closing based on the recipient and the level of formality. The closing can be aligned on the left or the right side of the page. In business letters, stick with "Regards," or "Respectfully," and sign your name underneath. Then print your name under the signature.

How to Write a Narrative

If you choose to write a narrative, it should be a story in which either you or someone you know well was actually involved. You should avoid stories that simply recount accidents. What I mean is this: a good story needs to have the element of choice in it. If you describe an accident, you need to show that decisions led up to it. This story should be about people, about the decisions they make and the consequences that follow.
A narrative is a moving picture. Like description, narratives need to have a rich texture of details so that the reader is seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching. The reader should experience the story, not simply hear it.

Stories add the element of time to description. Often stories start at the beginning and then follow the sequence of events chronologically. However, an effective variation on this pattern is to start in the middle of things and then use flashbacks to fill in the background information. This method is especailly effective in holding the reader's attention.

There are two extremes you want to avoid in writing a narrative. First, you can simply tell the story, event by event, without giving it any texture because you leave out descriptive details and dialogue. At the opposite extreme is a narrative that attempts to tell everything, painting detailed descriptions of every scene, quoting everything that is said, even speculating about the thoughts of the characters. A good narrative has texture, but it is suggestive rather than exhaustive. After all, the reader's imagination needs some room to fill in details. Giving too many details not only overwhelms the reader's imagination, it also slows the pace of the narrative.

Pacing is an important concept in narrative writing. Basically, pacing means that the writer sometimes slows the pace by putting more detail in, but sometimes she also hurries over details. A good way to know where to put in details and where to leave them out is to think of a narrative as consisting of episodes (smaller scenes that are strung together to make up a longer story). If you divide your story into a few short episodes, then you want suggestive detail within the episodes, but you want to hurry over the transitions between them. Think of episodes as pearls on a string. Make the pearls full orbed; keep the string stringy. The reader dwells in the episodes, but she needs to be oriented to them, and that is the function of the transitions.

As with description, point of view is important. What position is the story being told from? Another way of talking about this is to talk about the story's narrator. The narrator is not the writer, but the consciousness through which the story is told. Sometimes the story is told in third person, which means that every one is referred to as he, or she, or they. Sometimes, however, it is told in first person, which means that the narrator refers to himself as "I" and is actually involved in the story. Not all narrators are reliable.

The more sophisticated narratives become, the more problematic is the narrator. When the narrator tells the story in first person, but details in the story lead the reader to suspect that the narrator is not reliable, the result is irony. Irony is a narrative condition in which the reader and the writer share a common judgmental attitude toward the narrator, or when the reader knows more than the narrator and characters in the story.

For this assignment, it is probably better to tell the story as straight as possible. Irony is hard to pull off successfully. If you want to experiment with narrative form, I would suggest that you start somewhere in the middle of things and then use flashbacks. Also work on putting in suggestive but not overwhelming detail and dialogue. Try dividing your story into short episodes that build on each other. If you can pattern a sequence of events so that the story has some kind of climax (a scene of great tension and even explosion) followed by a denoument (a scene in which everything is worked out), you will have done more than many of us can.