Telling Stories, Talking Craft


Book Description

Telling Stories, Talking Craft is a collection of fifteen conversations with some of the finest contemporary fiction writers. These distinguished authors discuss their lives and their craft in candid, thought-provoking interviews from the pages of Sycamore Review, Purdue University’s international journal of literature, opinion and the arts.




Storytelling with Data


Book Description

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!




New Kid


Book Description

Winner of the Newbery Medal, Coretta Scott King Author Award, and Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature! Perfect for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Gene Luen Yang, New Kid is a timely, honest graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real, from award-winning author-illustrator Jerry Craft. Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade. As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds—and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself? This middle grade graphic novel is an excellent choice for tween readers, including for summer reading. New Kid is a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List. Plus don't miss Jerry Craft's Class Act!




Telling Stories


Book Description

A prolific and award-winning writer, Lee Martin has put pen to paper to offer his wisdom, honed during thirty years of teaching the oh-so-elusive art of writing. Telling Stories is intended for anyone interested in thinking more about the elements of storytelling in short stories, novels, and memoirs. Martin clearly delineates helpful and practical techniques for demystifying the writing process and provides tools for perfecting the art of the scene, characterization, detail, point of view, language, and revision—in short, the art of writing. His discussion of the craft in his own life draws from experiences, memories, and stories to provide a more personal perspective on the elements of writing. Martin provides encouragement by sharing what he’s learned from his journey through frustrations, challenges, and successes. Most important, Telling Stories emphasizes that you are not alone on this journey and that writers must remain focused on what they love: the process of moving words on the page. By focusing on that purpose, Martin contends, the journey will always take you where you’re meant to go.




Lead with a Story


Book Description

Storytelling has come of age in the business world. Today, many of the most successful companies use storytelling as a leadership tool. At Nike, all senior executives are designated "corporate storytellers." 3M banned bullet points years ago and replaced them with a process of writing "strategic narratives." Procter Gamble hired Hollywood directors to teach its executives storytelling techniques. Some forward-thinking business schools have even added storytelling courses to their management curriculum. The reason for this is simple: Stories have the ability to engage an audience the way logic and bullet points alone never could. Whether you are trying to communicate a vision, sell an idea, or inspire commitment, storytelling is a powerful business tool that can mean the difference between mediocre results and phenomenal success. Lead with a Story contains both ready-to-use stories and how-to guidance for readers looking to craft their own. Designed for a wide variety of business challenges, the book shows how narrative can help: * Define culture and values * Engender creativity and innovation * Foster collaboration and build relationships * Provide coaching and feedback * Lead change * And more Whether in a speech or a memo, communicated to one person or a thousand, storytelling is an essential skill for success. Complete with examples from companies like Kellogg's, Merrill-Lynch, Procter Gamble, National Car Rental, Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, and more, this practical resource gives readers the guidance they need to deliver stories to stunning effect.




Bible Stories and Crafts


Book Description

Dozens of stories about Bible characters and events are accompanied by discussion questions, memory verses, craft patterns, and more.




Choose Your Story, Change Your Life


Book Description

The things we tell ourselves affect how well or poorly our path in life goes. It’s time to flip the script on the internal stories you tell yourself and live life on your terms. Most of the “self-stories” you tell yourself—the kind of person you say you are and the things you are capable of—are invisible to you because they have become such a part of your everyday mental routine that you don’t even recognize they exist. Yet, these self-stories influence everything you do, everything you say, and everything you are. Choose Your Story, Change Your Life will help you take complete control of your self-stories and create the life you’ve always dreamed you’d have. Author Kindra Hall offers up a new window into your psychology, one that travels the distance from the frontiers of neuroscience to the deep inner workings of your thoughts and feelings. In Choose Your Story, Change Your Life, Kindra will help you: Uncover the truth of how you have created the life you have; Challenge everything you think you know about how your life has been built; Uncover the clear steps you can take to create the life you want; Take control of your self-story to become the author of who you are; and Live your life in a way you never have before. This eye-opening, but applicable journey will transform you from a passive listener of these limiting, unconscious thoughts to the definitive author of who you are and everything you want to be. Changing your life is as simple as choosing better stories to tell yourself. If you can change your story, you can change your life.




Superhuman Social Skills


Book Description

The people we surround ourselves with may impact our lives more than any other factor, and yet most people leave their social lives to chance. What would happen if you treated social skills as though they were indeed skills, and became proactive about your social life? Superhuman Social Skills is a transformative book which analyzes and explains how to be likeable, how to converse, how to tell stories, how to make friends, and how to combine those friends to create an incredible social circle. If you ever feel socially awkward, don't know what to say, or wish you had more or better friends, Superhuman Social Skills is for you.




Artifactual Literacies


Book Description

To re-engage students with literacy, teachers need an entry point that recognizes and honors students’ out-of-school identities. This book looks at how artifacts (everyday objects) access the daily, sensory world in which students live. Exploring how artifacts can generate literacy learning, the book shows teachers how to use a family photo, heirloom, or recipe to tell intergenerational tales; how to collaborate with local museums and cultural centers; how to create new material artifacts; and much more. Featuring vignettes, lesson examples, and photographs, the text includes chapters on community connections, critical literacy, adolescent writing, and digital storytelling. Book Features: A theoretical framework for teaching literacy that unites the domains of home and school and brings students’ passions to the forefront.A fresh, integrated synthesis of the fields of New Literacy Studies, multimodality, material cultural studies, and literacy education.New field-tested ideas for creating lessons that improve literacy standards. “This engaging book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how artifactual knowledge and practices cross borders in ways that can lead to powerful learning.” —Rebecca Rogers, University of Missouri–St. Louis “Pahl and Rowsell provide a rich framework for approaching and engaging everyday artifacts as potential sites of story, community building, and identity performance. . . . They open significant new avenues to literacy educators.” —From the Foreword by Lesley Bartlett and Lalitha Vasudevan, both at Teachers College, Columbia University




Stories, Storytellers, and Storytelling


Book Description

This book advances social scientific interest in a field long dominated by the humanities: stories, and storytelling. Stories are a whole lot more than entertainment; oral narratives, novels, films and immersive video games all form part of the sociocultural discourses which we are enmeshed in, and use to co-construct our beliefs about the world around us. Young children use them to learn about the world beyond their immediate sensory experience and, even in an era of interactive electronic media, the bedtime story remains a cherished part of most children’s daily routine. Storytelling is thus the first abstract formal learning method we encounter as human beings. It is also probably transcultural; perhaps even an immanent part of the human condition. Narratives are, at heart, sequences of events and presuppose and reinforce particular cause-and-effect relationships. Inevitably, they also construct unconscious biases, prejudices, and discriminatory attitudes. Storying (a term we use in this book to encompass stories, storytellers and storytelling) is complex, and this book seeks to make sense of it.