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Factual Recount-WPS Office
Factual Recount-WPS Office
WHAT IS A RECOUNT?
A recount retells an experience or an event that happened in the past. The purpose of a recount can be
to inform, entertain or to reflect and evaluate.
A recount can focus on a specific section of an event or retell the entire story. A recount should always
be told in the order that things happened.
PERSONAL RECOUNT
Retells an activity the writer has been personally involved in and may be used to build the relationship
between the writer and the reader e.g. anecdote, diary journal, personal letter. These usually retell an
event that the writer was personally involved in.
Reports the particulars of an incident by reconstructing factual information e.g. police reconstruction of
an accident, historical recount, biographical and autobiographical recounts. A factual recount is an
objective recount of a true event by someone not personally involved in the situation. Its purpose is
either to inform, entertain or both.
IMAGINATIVE RECOUNT
Applies factual knowledge to an imaginary role in order to interpret and recount events e.g. A Day in the
Life of a German soldier, How I manned the first mission to the moon. An imaginative recount is the re-
telling of events, usually in the first person. This style of recount allows for embellishment beyond facts
and events- perfect for creative writing.
PROCEDURAL RECOUNT
Records the steps in an investigation or experiment and thereby providing the basis for reported results
or findings. A procedural recount records events such as a science experiment or cooking. Procedural
recounts present the events chronologically (in the order in which happened). The purpose of
procedural recounts is to inform the audience.
LITERARY RECOUNT
Retells a series of events for the purpose of entertainment. A literary recount is like a factual recount.
Both provide details about what happened, including who was involved, when and where the event took
place, and what may have resulted. A literary recount can be about real or fictional events and
characters.
Personal Recount- A personal recount is when the writer is involved in the event. A personal recount
has a beginning a middle and an end.
Factual Recount- A factual recount is a recount where the writer is not in the recount but the structure is
the same as a personal recount, because it has a beginning, middle and end.
The difference between a personal recount and a factual recount is that a personal recount is a personal
moment that you have experienced and a factual recount is when it's a moment that the writer has not
experienced but has seen or thinks it is interesting to write about.
Activity One -
Watch the following Behind the News Clip about some children who came to Australia on the First Fleet
in 1788.
Once you have watched the clip write factual recount about this in your writing book.
Have a beginning, middle and end (first, next, then, after, finally)
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Definition of the text type: A recount is a written or spoken narration of an event that happened in the
past. There are two main kinds of recount:
1) Factual recounts: These are used to record details and facts of a particular event which the speaker or
writer has not necessarily been involved in.
2) Personal recounts: These describe events that the speaker/writer was personally involved in. In
written form this is usually autobiographical.
All recounts need to have a problem which is resolved, so each recount type should have a beginning
(exposition), a middle (the problem of the story), and resolution (solution to the problem posed).
Context: recounts form part of everyday life, through letters, conversations, anecdotes, or chat shows.
We are constantly recounting events to each other.
Audience: For personal recounts this will often be friends or colleagues making the recounts informal.
Factual recounts may have an official audience such as the police or a judge.
Writer-reader, speaker-listener relationship: If the writer/speaker knows the reader/listener the recount
may form part of a friendly or family relationship. Factual recounts assume a far more distant
relationship and will be more impersonal. Recounts will often be oral.
Grammatical features:
Factual recounts:
c) use of the past and past perfect tenses for retelling events and reporting speech
d) emphasis on time expressions, conjunctions to denote sequence of events, prepositional phrases and
prepositions of time
g) nouns, nouns phrases, adjectives and adjective phrases used to clarify events and people
Personal recounts:
c) use of a wide range of tenses, particularly past tenses for narrative; possible use of the present tense
for dramatic immediacy
g) a wide range of nouns, noun phrases, adjectives and adjective phrases used to describe; likely to be
largely realistic
Chronological order and descriptive modifiers should be used to express clarity in this format.