Personal narrative (PN) is a prose narrative relating personal experience usually told in first person; its content is nontraditional. "Personal" refers to a story from one's life or experiences. "Nontraditional" refers to literature that does not fit the typical criteria of a narrative.

Charlotte Linde writes about life stories, which are similar to the personal narrative: "A life story consists of all the stories and associated discourse units, such as explanations and chronicles, and the connections between them, told by an individual during his/her lifetime that satisfy the following two criteria: The stories and associated discourse units contained in the life story have as their primary evaluation a point about the speaker, not a general point about the way the world is. The stories and the associated discourse units have extended reportability."

Linde also mentions that life story and autobiography have similarities and differences: “the primary way autobiography differs from life story is that it is a written, not oral form. More specifically it constitutes literary genre with its history, its demands, and its market.” Jeff Todd Titon also refers to personal narrative as being very similar to a life story. “A life story is, simply, a person's story of his or her life or what he or she thinks is a significant part of that life.” Titon goes on to state that personal narrative arises from conversation. According to Linda Degh, an example of personal narrative would include “any part of life history from the cradle to the grave, including great turning points to insignificant details in family life, occupation, entertainment, celebration, religion, crisis, illness, and travel, may provide material for elaboration into a narrative.”

A personal narrative can be organized by two coherence principles of life stories: causality and continuity. Causality is the relationship between cause and effect. This means that one action is the result of the other's action. Continuity is the consistent existence of something over some time.

William Labov defines personal narrative as “one verbal technique for recapitulating experience, in particular a technique of constructing narrative units which match the temporal sequence of that event.” Labov argues that narrative can be broken down into subcategories such as the abstract, orientation, complication, resolution, evaluation, and coda. The abstract is the summary of the story that usually comes at the very beginning of a story. Labov notes that the orientation (introduction) serves to orient the listener in respect to person, place, time, and behavioural situation. The orientation tells us how the story begins. An example would be “I went to the store in San Francisco.” The complication of a narrative is the conflict. A complication is key in narrative because without complication there can be no resolution. Labov writes that the complication is regularly terminated by a result. This result is referred to as the resolution. Evaluation comes when the author reflects on the events that occurred in the story. This is common in personal narratives. Coda is another word for a conclusion. The coda concludes the evaluation and gives efficient closure to the narrative. Lastly, Labov notes that narrative is usually told in answer to some stimulus from outside.

Different approaches can be applied to personal narrative such as performance and sociolinguistic. Performance in a narrative is the execution of an action. Performance as a new and integrated approach overcomes the division of text and context resulting from more traditional approaches. When it comes to the personal narrative as a conversational interaction, Langellier thinks that personal narrative as a story text and storytelling share a concept of narrative as a separate unit of communication. Conversational interaction meaning face-to-face verbal and story text is referring to the actual written narrative. The sociolinguistic approach includes different techniques such as intensifiers, comparators, correlatives, and explicative to fully evaluate narratives. Intensifiers are used to develop one particular event. Comparators move away from the actual event and consider what could have happened. Correlatives join two events with a single independent clause. Explicatives interrupt the narrative to go back or forth in time.

Narrative is an elementary need of people, according to the "homo narrans" theory, and personal narrative is the "paradigm of human communication," one of the main activities performed on a daily basis. Narratives have the power to lend orderliness to unordered experiences, personal narratives reflect social organization and cultural values, and are intertwined with social evaluation of people and their actions.

At the core of personal narrative is a moral evaluation of self. The moral proposition present in all first-person narratives is, "I am a good person," or that the speaker acted wrong, and learned what was right. A key aspect of personal storytelling is the narrator must tell the story to persuade the listener that they would have acted similarly; the speaker extends their moral stance to the listener as well.