Week 12 StoryLab: Chapter 2 of a Writing Manual for College Students

 This blog post is a summary of Chapter 2 of a writing manual made for college students. This chapter elaborates on telling a story, which would be extremely beneficial in this course. 

The chapter starts with a powerful quote that is indeed very true. 

"We're all stories, in the end." - Steven Moffat, Doctor Who

The chapter also provides an excellent analogy of how storytelling underlies all sorts of writing. For example, the books gives up an illustration of how chemists analyze observable data to determine the cause and effect behaviors of a natural and synthetic maters. The lab report is basically narrative over the experiment. The characters are the elements and the reaction is the plot!

A term I learned in this chapter that wasn't necessarily taught to me growing up is "scope." The books gives an excellent example of how to describe this piece of elemental writing. Scope is basically the edges of a photograph. Like, where and when does it begin and end? Scope refers to the boundaries of the plot being written. The scope of a plot affects the way your viewers perceive your story, which is quite important. 

Another important thing to remember during writing is sequence and pacing. This is the order of the events and the amount of time a writer gives to each event. This determines your reader's experience. This is determined by unique individual parts of the story being written like: Exposition, Rising Acton, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution. Skipping any of these, or writing too long in one of these areas, can cause a choppy or dragging story. This narrative shape is quite useful just to make sure that your story is entertaining all the way through. 

The last important thing that I gathered from this chapter of the book would be tone. Tone is very crucial when it comes to writing. You don't want to write a story about the passing of a priest with a happy tone. A writer should always carry and emphasize a tone that correlates with the plot. An emotional connection between the diction chosen and the plot created carries the reader through an experience, mentally, which is extremely beneficial for a writer who wants to have people actually read their stories.