Retelling about one's holiday can be good as an example of recount text. It recounts the events in chronological order. Read the following recount about holiday.

My Holiday was Fantastic
Last summer I got a fantastic holiday. I visited some great places.

I went to an airport and was going to fly to Cleveland. I was spending there two days. I liked to see some Cleveland Cavaliers basketball matches.

Then I went to Hollywood. Hollywood is a famous district in Los Angeles, California, United States. It had become world-famous as the center of the film industry. Four major film companies – Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO and Columbia – had studios in Hollywood. I did not want to leave but I had to.

After that, I went to New York city. I visited the Statue of Liberty. I went from the bottom of Manhattan to the top of the crown. That was very amazing.

The places made me feel at home but I have to go home. Next time I would return to them.

What is recount text? Recount text is a text which list and describe one's experiences by retelling events in the order in which they happened

Recount text can found in the way of a biography is written. A biography conveys details about a person's life or about an episode in their life. See the following example of recount text about the life of someone.

Short Biography of Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain was the lead singer and the guitarist of an American grunge band called Nirvana. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington, on 20 February 1967.

When Cobain was eight years old, his parents divorced. This divorce gave bad impact on his life. At his fourteenth birthday, his uncle gave him a guitar as the gift. Since that, he began work on his own songs. He and his friend, Krist Novoselic usually practiced music in the upstairs room of a salon own by Novoselic`s mother.

In 1986, they formed a grunge band named Nirvana. Cobain was the vocalist as well as guitarist and Novoselic played bass. They released their first album titled Bleach in 1989. In 1991 they released the second album, Never mind. It was their greatest album which made them a kind of popular superstar. This album included popular songs like Smell Like Teen Spirit, About A Girl, Come as You Are, In Bloom and Lithium.

However the popularity was intimidating to Cobain. He began addicted to drugs and became worse, even he overdosed on heroin. On March 30, he went to a rehabilitation but ran away. He was reported missing for a few days. Then on 8 April 1994, he was found dead in his house in Lake Washington. He had shot himself.

I have posted an example of recount text about retelling a terrible experience. And this is another recount text in a biography, a short written account of a Dallas Cowboys starter

Biography of Marion Barber
Marion Barber was born on June 9, 1983, and growing up in Minnesota. He attended Wayzata High School in Minnesota, and excelled in football, baseball, and track. Then, he attended the University of Minnesota, where he majored in Business Marketing.

In his college football career, Marion Barber would earn myriad honors and broke numerous records to boot. Marion Barber’s 3,276 yards and 14 100-yard rushing games ranked third in Minnesota Golden Gophers history.

Marion Barber hit the big time when the Dallas Cowboys selected him as the fourth round of the 2005 NFL Draft. Fans with Dallas Cowboys tickets watched Marion Barber emerge as a starter, rushing for 95 yards against the Seattle Seahawks and 127 yards against the Arizona Cardinals, which was the first 100-yard rushing game of the season for the Dallas Cowboys. He and the Dallas Cowboys agreed to a six-year contract extension worth $45 million. His stats will continue to improve and impress his teammates, coaches, and fans with Dallas Cowboys tickets.

This example of recount text in biography of Marrion Barber is simplified from: www.onlinetickets.com/info/sports_nfl/dallas_cowboys/marion_barber_bio.html

Recount text is commonly labeled as non-fiction writing. It is one of kind text genres, beside of narrative, spoof and others. Recount text can be a found in many ways to write a biography. The following is an example of recount text about the written account of famous scientist life, Albert Einstein

Short Biography of Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was born near the end of the 1800s in Ulf, Germany. He graduated from the University of Zurich in Switzerland at age 26. That was also when he did his famous work in physics. Fourteen years later he won the Nobel Prize for Physics.
For the next ten years he lived in Germany and traveled a lot to talk to other scientists. Then in the early 1930s he had to leave Germany because of Hitler and the Nazi party. He moved to the United States. From that time until his death he lived in Princeton, New Jersey. He died at the age of 74.

Recount text is included in a group of narration, similar to spoof and narrative. Recount text focuses on the series of event, one event followed by the others. Commonly recount text is arranged in chronological order; whether by time or by the essence of the event itself. Read the following example of recount text which narrates a survival experience from a horror situation.

Bus was Flowing Right Behind Me
I stayed a night at Sakhuwa of Gati VDC because a landslide near Baseri had blocked the road, The next morning, I hopped onto the bus with registration number Ba 2 Kha 4013 that was on the way to Barhabise from Tatopani.
I took a seat by the doorside and remember that there were around 35 passengers, including me. The driver started the bus. A kilometer into the journey, I noticed a ditch on the road.
The driver tried to avert the ditch. Before I could know what was going on, the bus started hurtling towards the Bhotekoshi.
I had given up hope of surviving, but found a ventilator glass broken. I came out of the shattered glass and plunged into the Bhotekoshi.
The river carried me for about 35 kilometers and left me on the shallow surface. I passed out after that. The rescuers took me to a hospital when I regained consciousness.
I heard later that all except four passengers had survived. I have sustained injuries on the face, hands and other body parts. Nonetheless, I feel that surviving was my destiny.

Text types is generalized in two kinds; fiction and no-fiction. Fiction will be close relating to literature while non-fiction is deal more in technical usage of daily life.
Browsing over the Internet, I find a very useful source to learn text types in non-fiction summary. They are:
1. Report text, this kind of text is to describe the way things are, give detail description as they are
2. Procedure, this instructional text is to instruct or describe how to make something or how something is done through a series of sequenced steps or phases.
3. Recount, this text tries to retell events. Commonly the events happened in the past
4. Explanation, this kind of text surely explains the process involved in nature and how something works. Explanation text is composed a lot in natural phenomena.
5. Persuasion, as its word root, persuasive text tries to argue the case for a point of view and in higher point it makes to convince and persuade readers. Persuasion text is studied in two types; analytical exposition and hortatory text.
6. Discussion, a type of text which present argument and information from different points of view. Generally discussion text is accomplished with a recommendation
7. The other types of non-fiction text such as Internet material, leaflet, interview, diary, journalistic writing, biography and autobiography can be seen at lancsngfl.ac.uk

Learning text types is presented as the main subject in English lesson for high school students. Most of the time during their time in high school, the students focus their attention to text types with each generic structure and what language used to construct the texts varying to each other. That generic structure and language features which are commonly found different from one text to another is used based on the purpose of each genres.

Text types in the three main genres which must be studied in high school specially designed for graduate competences standard (SKL) are:
NARRATION
This narrative genre includes narrative, recount, and news item. All these text types in narrative genres composed to tell and inform.
DESCRIPTION
The texts which include in descriptive genres are report, descriptive, and explanation. These text genres are written to describe. They tend to use words with describing sense and not telling
ARGUMENTATION
Argumentative genres will cover analytical exposition, hortatory exposition and discussion. These text types explore reason to answer the question "why" and "how".

To enlarge our knowledge, texts are defined into three main genres which slightly different from the above classification referring to the high school graduate competences standard. According to nationalstrategies, the tree main genres which show the text types distinctions are as follow:
1. NARRATIVE which includes adventure, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, contemporary fiction, dilemma stories, dialogue, myths, legends, fairy tales, and fables.
2. NON-FICTION which accommodates discussion texts, explanatory texts, instructional text, persuasion texts, non-chronological reports and recounts.
3. POETRY which refers to free verse, visual poems and structured poems.

The events will be told in chronological order based on time and place. If we get recount text with complete generic structure, it will be constructed by structuring orientation, events and re-orientation. The absence of complication/problem/conflict in the generic structure is actually differentiating from narrative. Arranging these series of event in beautiful and attractive way is the power of writer in composing recount text. Below is piece of passage which can be read as recount text.

My Rush Time as a Journalist

I usually woke up at eight o'clock a.m. and went to the Press Center to check the daily schedule of briefings and press conferences. It was usually held by the United Nation officials or disaster mitigation team.

It was challenging to visit different refugee camps to find soft stories, human interest stories. After that I went back to the Press Center to cover the press conferences of the day.

It was heart breaking when I saw these survivors fight for food and secondhand clothing. Unfortunately as they said, the food and clothing were limited and inadequate. Emerging to glaring, fool noon, it was time to go back to Press Center to write stories and race against time. I was always fearing that the internet would come crushing down.

After everything was done, only then I remembered to eat. Most times, I only ate once a day because I always had to rush and again it was difficult to find food. I had to travel quite far. I needed to spend a 30 to 45 minutes by car just to find fresh food.

Something which happened in the past is the main resource to compose both recount and narrative text. In writer's point of view, the thing is an experience. It can be what the writer has done, hear, read, and felt. Composing recount and narrative is retelling the experiences of the past event to be a present event.
What does recount differ from narrative?
The easiest way to catch the difference is analyzing the generic structure. Recount text presents the past experiences in order of time or place; what happened on Sunday, then on Monday, the on Tuesday. In simple way, recount describes series of events in detail. It does not expose the struggle on how to make them happen. The event happened smoothly. On the other hand, narrative introduces crises and how to solve them. Narrative text always appear as a hard potrait of participant's past experience. It reveals the conflict among the participants. Cinderella's conflicts with her step mother and sister are the example. The conflict is the most important element in a narrative text. Narrative without comflicts is not narrative any more.