Prof Barnhurst's lecture

Even though Professor Barnhurst’s lecture gets cut off at the end, it is one of the most interesting lectures.  He focuses on human storytelling.  He begins by having the students do an assignment called “speed narrating” in which students had to tell a story of an important event in their life.  They were then asked to compare notes in order to find similarities. 

Professor Barnhurst states that story telling always has a clear pattern.  We begin by announcing that we are going to tell a story by saying something like “oh that reminds me...”  We then describe where we were, what we were doing, and who we were with.  Finally we tell the complicating action and the resolution, or the response.  If we didn’t tell stories in this way, the listeners would be confused.

The way we tell stories can relate to our most basic model of communication.  According to this model, the sender is the person telling the story [message] to the receiver.  This can even get more complex in Schramm’s Model of Communication when the receiver begins to decode and interpret the information that is being given. And then responds to the storyteller, thus sending out another message.

With that said, the most important part of storytelling is the interpretation because it is everywhere.  Professor Barnhurst states that “From the beginning everyone knows what kind of story it’s going to be” based on word choice as well as our tone of voice.  Right before the video cuts off, Professor Barnhurst begins discussing the difference between interpretation and judgment. To me, interpretation is how we receive the message—based on something from our past or from what we know about the person telling the story.  Judgment is the conclusion or our opinion of the message.  This relates to the topic of perception.  The third step of perception is interpretation.  It is important to be aware of how we tell stories because the message can be easily misinterpreted which can lead to a lack of intimacy.