Professor Barnhurst's elements of storytelling

Professor Barnhurst’s lecture was based upon the elements of storytelling, and the way stories are analyzed. Before Barnhurst begins his lecture, he does an activity with the students. He asks them to pair up and individually tell each other stories about an important event or time in their own life.  After the students complete the activity, Barnhurst then discussed the stories with them and pin points the main details which were represented in almost every story. Each pair related their story to a specific time, event, place and people. Other than this, it was discussed that you could sometimes figure out what another person’s story was about just by the narrators body language and hand gestures and movements. This simple observation is what Barnhurst explains is something that has been being analyzed by theorists and trying to understand further.  This simple activity and its findings I found relatable to our discussion and lesson relating to non-verbal codes.

Barnhurst states that the most important part of storytelling is the interpretation of the story being told. Yet, there is always a clear pattern of storytelling. The pattern described is announcement, description, action, resolution and response.  It makes sense to me that if a story was told out of order or a part was left out that the story would not make sense or would be very hard to interpret. This pattern can be related to our lesson on Schramms model of Communication. The people sharing the story being the sender and receiver, the message being the story, and the receiver having to encode and decode the message for interpretation.

Unfortunately Barnhurst’s lecture ends while he is still discussing the difference between interpreting a story and judging it. If I had to finish the lecture and imagine what Barnhurst what would have been said, I would believe that interpreting a story would be the way you understand it, and internally accept what you are being told. Judging the story would be your outward opinion of the story or topic, and what information you choose to agree or disagree with and act upon.