Today, I want to give you a tool for improving your stories. It’s a diagram to show you what your story should look like. I draw it on chalkboards and flip charts and white boards and paper everywhere! This diagram is the core of my approach to storytelling. I use it to plan my stories […]
The beginning of 2019 gave us the 10-year-challenge on social media. It’s a simple task to participate, you post a picture of yourself now and ten years ago online, add a catchy caption (or not) and you’re in. It’s been discussed as a way to show off your great fortune,potential data mining event, and a […]
Picking the hero is the first step in planning your story. If you want to get started now, download a free Who’s Your Hero Worksheet. You can also read the rest of the post for insights into how your hero changes your story! We use hero’s names to refer to stories in many fairy tales: […]
Sometime last fall, I decided to use fairy tales in my storytelling workshops. It wasn’t one of those careful choices that one makes based on some kind considered decision-making process. It was something I threw out in a conversation because I found it entertaining to ask academics to talk about Little Red Riding Hood. My […]
This post is a supplement to my Deskundigheidsdag presentation at In’to Languages at Radboud University. Authentic teaching materials are everywhere if you’re a language teacher. There are newspapers, websites, and textbooks galore if you are looking for non-fiction or literary texts to work with. These texts are impersonal. They do not tell individual stories and […]
Telling a story can be intimidating, even if the audience is friends or family. Luckily, all of us, myself included, have stories we’ve told many times. These are the stories we tell over and over again over time. They are the reliable stories that we love to share or answers to questions we answer every […]