Storytelling with Barnhurst

In professor Barnhurst’s lecture, he has the students do a little activity where they pair up and tell each other stories about events that have happened to them recently.  While the first person tells the story, the second person takes notes on the story being told, and then they switch roles.  After all this is done, he has the pairs of two join into groups of four.  In these groups of four he asks them to look for patterns in the notes.  He likens this activity to what it’s like looking at research, trying to find the patterns in the “stories” that make up the research, something that has been plaguing theorists for a long time. 

He also mentions the abstract, something that we talked about in class when looking at how research articles are put together.  The abstract is basically the annunciation that you are about to tell a story, this way you let the person you’re communicating with know what you’re about to do.  We talked about in class how you can defy social expectations by doing things that don’t exactly follow the “way” things are supposed to be done.  In the case of the abstract, you would defy someone’s expectations if by telling them a story without first preparing them with a statement such as “oh here’s a funny story” or “I remember this one time”.  If you just started telling the story without giving them proper preparation, it would confuse them, and possibly cause a misunderstanding.  In terms of research, this is important because without the abstract, you’re not adequately prepping your audience for the information you’re about to give them. 

He goes on further to say that to have a successful story, one most not only have a setting (whether it be time or place), but also a complicating action, a response, and finally an interpretation.  These are all things that are not only important in research, but are needed to convey stories from one individual to another.  Putting together a setting for the story helps the listener get a better feel for the situation as a whole.  If they can picture themselves in the setting, then they have a better chance of understanding the story.  The complicating action, in laymen’s terms, is the conflict that happens in the story, the thing that people prefix with “you wouldn’t believe what happened next”.  The response is how the story teller responded to the complicating action, and finally the interpretation is how the listener of the story reacts to the story as a whole. 

Now if you look at these different aspects of storytelling that Barnhurst introduces, they’re really not that different from the ones we covered in class.  Now, we didn’t specifically talk about storytelling in class, but when we looked at the way a research article is presented, it certainly looks similar to what Barnhurst is saying.  The abstract is something that is mentioned in both, and serves the same purpose in both.  The complicating action is much like the introduction in a research article, it tells us what the problem is that the story (or article) is about.  The response, on the other hand, would be like the method, it tells us what we did about the problem that the introduction introduced us to.  Finally, the interpretation is a lot like the discussion at the end of an article.  It gives us a chance, as a reader, to soak in all the information that was presented before us.  Overall I thought it was a rather interesting lecture, even though the video cuts out about half way through.