Narrative Assignment

Step One: tell a story

first draft due to the wiki by TBA, midnight EST

Step Two: integrate a definitional argument into your narrative

Step Three: remix 3 peer narratives by TBA, midnight EST

One way to direct attention is to tell a story. Narrative is simply the organization of information in space and time. For example, the little musical gnome "here's a story of a man named Brady....." sets the stage and determines a starting point: the story of the Brady Bunch begins when two single parents unite forces. The Brady Bunch jingle just one example of the useful "once upon a time" catch phrase, which uses chronology as a way of organizing information: first this happened, then that other thing. Of course, on a more serious note, it takes work to sort these things out, because in web texts, many things are happening at once. Producing, analyzing and revising narratives yields and organizes important and transformative information about who we are, where we are, and where we'd like to go, so narrative is becoming the lingua franca of most projects--projects are really stories, the organization of people, tools, and resources in space and time. In medicine, Kathryn Montgomery Hunter tells us, cases are organized and communicated in narrative form; cases bring together information from diverse technical idiom and convey this information through plots as "the patient's story is encapsulated and retold in the physician's account of the process of disease in this one individual" (Doctor's Stories: the Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge, p. 51).

Basically, try and think about narrative as a potent site of self experimentation, as well as a means of expression, persuasion and information management.

This assignment asks you to use narrative as a way to explore an issue, introduce characters, plot specific examples, clarify or stretch definitions, and articulate an analysis of a particular context for a specific audience of readers.

The TV Tropes Wiki is a great tool for writing stories. TV Tropes Wiki shows how basic elements of story telling get used over and over again, and if you drop your favorite show into their search engine, you can get a concrete sense of what a "trope" is. And then, of course, you can blog about this. Yes, and, what's more, emboldened, you will select some of these narrative patterns and and adapt them to a story you want to tell, or to convey any information that you want a specific listener or reader to understand or keep with them for a while.