Story Telling

As discussed in lecture, symbols can be anything from letters and words to objects. Professor Barnhurst specializes and focused his lecture on the sociology of young minds. In doing so he asked the class to write out notes about stories and then broke down how story telling works. Symbols are a major factor for breaking down the story telling process. Barnhurst explained that people start with the abstract, for example: “I have a story to tell you!” These simple words, or symbols, before a story prepare a person for what is to come. Barnhurst explains that if you just started telling a story without announcing in some way via use of symbols that you are in fact going to tell a story, people would be confused. It would also seem pertinent to take into account distance while speaking.

Story telling has these basic elements to it but the language and symbols you would use for the audience and the content of the story would be affected. If it is a deeply personal one, intimate distance is used and so on and so forth up until public distance. This reiterates how closely intertwined verbal and non-verbal communication are, that is it not simply an either or but that how we physically present ourselves affects the story’s interpretation (another step in story telling which actually, unlike the rest of the steps, occurs simultaneously with all previous steps discussed by Professor Barnhurst).

These next two steps of story telling, complicating action and resolution, are most closely relatable to framing. Framing is how we use symbols to convey our messages and stories in ways that are most beneficial to us and / or to the situation. When the complicating action aspect of the story comes into play we are typically saying things like, “you won’t believe what happens next!” Everyone knows they have exaggerated a story a time or two either to make it more interesting for the listener, to appear cooler or not crazy, to impress or to defer and so on. Regardless of the reasoning when in this step of story telling it would almost seem like a give that one would frame to benefit themselves or others.

Resolution, the final step (besides the overall step of interpretation), provides the “what happens next” of the story. This is also relatable to framing because we all understand the feeling of thinking of a great comeback much later after an argument or a flirtatious encounter and thinking, “ugh why didn’t I say that instead?” Sometimes, without even realizing you relay the story to a roommate or a friend or a parent and you may alter just what you said, framing the story, to incorporate your much better, much too late comeback.

Overall the steps of story telling are so basic that we hardly think twice about the pattern involved. We forget or fail to realize that we are choosing our symbols / language and framing them in such a way to not only convey the story but in a way that allows for the proper interpretation from the first step to the last.