Professor Barnhurst

Professor’s Barnhurst lecture focused on how humans share patterns in storytelling.  He started his lecture with an activity with the class. He told two people to get together and tell a story to each other. Professor Barnhurst told the class it had to be a story that means something to them or has some significance to them. Then he told them to get together with two more people, to make a group of four. He also told them to write down notes while hearing the person’s story. At the end there were four people per group, and the professor asked them what similitaries were present in the stories that they told.

Professor Barnhurst says that there are specific parts to storytelling, which include announcing that you are telling a story (the abstract), the setting (who, what, when), complicating action, and the resolution. He says the interpretation is a separate part that is essentially the most important. Professor Barnhurst says that everything we say is interpreted. Everything that comes out of our mouth can be interpreted by our tone or the way we say things. I can relate to this, whenever I talk to people, I always interpret messages by the way they’re said, more so than what is actually said. Then after the interpretation comes the response part.

            His lecture reminded me of some concepts we talked about in class. We talked about the basic model of communication and also the more detailed model, Schramm’s model. In Schramm’s model, we have the message, encoder, decoder, and interpreter. This model represents essentially the storytelling concept that Professor Barnhurst talked about. We have the sender/receiver, and then there are messages that have to be encoded and decoded to interpret the message.

            Also, we talked about the three step process of perception. The last step of the process was interpretation. Professor Barnhurst said this was the most important step in storytelling. We learned in class that interpretation is when you attach meaning to someone’s words and messages. Going along with interpretation, we also learned about paralanguage. In our class lecture, we discussed that paralanguage could be characterized with vocal characteristics and the vocal qualifiers (intensity, pitch, extent, etc.) You can interpret someone’s messages by paying attention to their paralanguage, which is a type of non-verbal message code.

            Professor Branhurst lecture was really interesting. I found the group activity really fascinating because I never knew that we all told stories in such a similar fashion and followed certain steps without actually realizing it.