This document discusses the importance of storytelling in digital storytelling. It emphasizes that the story or narrative is the most essential element, as stories help audiences connect and recall information. An effective story follows a basic structure such as introduction, development, climax, and resolution, and employs persuasive techniques like emotional, ethical, and logical appeals. When creating a digital story, the story must be concise but filled with enough details that can be supplemented with visual elements like pictures and music. Digital tools can enhance storytelling by making stories more personal and shareable to wider audiences.

1. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
On any assignment, before we begin working on things digital we talk about forming a narrative. What are we trying to
communicate? What is the message? How does the technology or tool that we choose enhance, contribute to or help to
disseminate our message? How does the medium influence the message?
This is my spiel on why story is important and why narratives matter.
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2. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
The storytelling is the heart of a digital story.
Whether it’s demonstrating knowledge of a competency in a course or presenting data gathered in a research project, the
narrative is the glue that holds projects and presentations together. Stories are how audiences connect and recall information.
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3. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
This story arc formula: INTRODUCTION->DEVELOPMENT->CLIMAX->RESOLUTION usually works best.
Think also about Aristotle’s modes of persuasion: emotional appeal (Pathos), Ethical appeal (Ethos), and Logical appeal (Logos).
Simply giving the audience facts and instruction is not a story. Narratives are best crafted when the audience is invited to
connect to a story of shared values or common experience through ethical appeal. Data and evidence can be presented through
logical appeal. Emotional appeal stirs audiences to feel and connect making narratives in a digital story or project compelling.
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4. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
Creating a narrative for a digital story is an exercise in the economy of writing. Digital stories should be short- 3 minutes of
recorded audio which equates to one and a half double-spaced typed pages. The details that you choose to include or omit
matters. Can you fill in details with pictures, graphics, or music? How can these digital elements add to your story?
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5. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
Let's start first with the history of storytelling:
Why do we tell stories?
Why do people tell stories?
Historically...as a way to transfer knowledge, make sense of experience, teach values, beliefs, have a moral outcome...
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6. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
Narratives address the listener, reader or viewer (as in a digital story) as a human being rather that as a member of a class or
society. A digital story allows us to relate to each other as another self. It increases understanding of others.
Narratives are written with the anticipation to communicate to others.
The narrator is the subject of their own story-->their narrative identity is subjective and inter-subjective-->what others/outsiders
perceive of them and how the narrator sees themselves.
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7. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
Narratives are a way to make stories more personal rather than instructional. They invite the listener into the story, to become a
part of it rather than telling the listener what to believe, what to do....
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8. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
Stories are our attempt to explain, understand, and account for experience. Experience does not automatically assume a
narrative form. It's constructed through the process of reflection on experience.
It' a process of socialization; a reciprocal agreement of sorts where we give our stories and receive other's stories to increase
understanding of each other.
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9. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
Now let's start thinking about story organization.
What are stories made of?
Beginning, middle, end. Yes. They must HAVE A POINT. A PLOT.
Stories don't have to be linear (this takes practice)
There is an opening or introduction and a closing or conclusion, a resolve.
Stories can work best when they are book-ended= the challenge of the story is presented at the beginning and the ending gives
the resolve or the conclusion to the challenge introduced at the beginning.
Think about the plot's capacity to reconfigure the narrative to speak meaningful about the human action.
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10. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
What is the hook of your story? How will you capture the audience's attention? How will you keep it going throughout your story?
Can you think of a hook in a recent story you read or a movie you might have seen?
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11. Storytelling in Digital Storytelling
The digital in digital storytelling gives it wings. I like to think of it as a story on steroids. You still need a well thought-out and
sharp written story to turn into a compelling narrative but digital tools can make the story powerful. Tech tools can help enhance
and further personalize a digital story. The powerful element that digital in digital storytelling provides is to make the stories
visible to a variety of audiences by sharing them in new ways.
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By Sonia Chaidez
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