Professor Barnhurst

         Professor Barnhurst’s lecture focused on human communication, particularly storytelling. He focused on how we tell stories, and how these stories effect the communication of others.  There is always a clear pattern to how someone tells a story, we don’t necessarily think about this, but Professor Barnhurst brings up a great point.  When we begin a story we do not just start by saying something like, “This is my story so listen” or anything along those lines.  The way we bring up a story is more organic, and this then enables other to relate to your story or to continue to interaction.  

While listening to Professor Barnhursts lecture, I could not help but relate it to basic verbal communication that we covered in class.  I wanted to relate this lecture to overlapping codes and code switching to begin with.  This goes along with professor Barnhursts lecture because we use overlapping codes to provide an arena of common interest.  We would use overlapping codes when story telling in order to relate to the person you are talking to.  Using overlapping codes helps you gain a more intimate interaction with whomever you are speaking with, we subconsciously use this in order for our verbal communication to match the situation we are in.  Code switching goes along with this as well, this is when we switch between communication styles or even dialect in order to further reinforce intimacy.  This is very common, you may tell your friend a story in one way, but when you tell your mother or grandmother that same story, you might take a different approach.  This different approach can be through your dialect, or just communicating in the style that you know the listener uses to communicate.  We use these two tools all the time when we are communicating, because we interact with so many different people throughout everyday.  

Professor Barnhursts lecture was cut off at the end however I wanted to make a connection between his mention of interpretation and judgement.  This definitely relates to our discussion of perception in class. Interpretation is the third step to perception.  When someone tells a story, we attach meaning, this can be negative or positive, however our interpretation is how we internalize something we hear or see.  People who  tell stories use language as their tool to entice people and keep people interested.  However if someone interprets a story differently than the speaker intends, this can turn to judgement.  This is important to keep in mind because communication is so powerful, there is a chance that something you say can be interpreted incorrectly and then judgement comes into play, which does not reinforce intimacy.  It is also important to appropriately code-switch in order to match the communication style of the listener so the interaction does not lead to judgement.