Prof. Barnhurst

Before beginning his lecture, Professor Barnhurst had his audience form pairs and tell each other stories of significant events that occurred recently within their lives. They were to take notes and look for patterns within the structure of their stories. Once the exercise was over, Professor Barnhurst discussed what the students had found. Everyone had similar results. They found that their stories presented their listeners with detailed settings, such as location, people, etc. and that many of the stories told revolved around one main event. An interesting observation that was made during the exercise was that an outsider to a conversation could imply as to what the conversation being told is about just by the narrator’s physical movements. These simple observations by college students, Prof. Barnhurst explains, is what communication theorists have spent much time trying to observe and understand.

Within the lecture, he explains that there are different elements to storytelling. Most often, narrators begin their story with an abstract, or basically an introduction. This includes a description of the environment of the story being told. This is very similar to the ideas presented to us in class in regards to reading within the social sciences. The importance of reading the abstract was stressed as it holds a brief summary of the material within the much longer article. However, the idea of the physical actions a story teller makes caught my eye. It made me realize how when I find myself in a social setting that may be loud or busy, the physicality the narrator has sometimes tells the story without me even having to listen to the actual content. The ability to do so comes from the fact that we as listeners use schemas to help us interpret what the narrator is saying and that the narrator uses a combination of non-verbal messages codes and framing to get their interpretation of an event across. Just from prior knowledge, people can pick up on associated gestures and their meanings. Also, their own backgrounds and culture help even further bind certain gestures and meanings. As a listener, by only hearing certain words chosen to help frame a story by the narrator and seeing what non-verbals go along with those words, tells the story a million times better. This is because not only is the listener listening to words, but also seeing a reaction, therefore interpreting feelings of the story teller.

Never for a moment did I ever think there was structure to storytelling or that a narrator and listener played important roles within the event of telling a story. For me as a listener, it was always something that I knew I would either enjoy or dread, just from hearing the first few words. Now, everything makes sense as I now realize I would predict the story from hearing the abstract.