Today, I decided to play around with number 4 from my take-aways yesterday. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and might have more reading on my hands.

I figured out what was bothering me about the “Narrative structure is general knowledge” statement, though. I am personally pretty committed to the idea that narrative is somehow bio-linguistically ingrained (whew, that’s a big word). But I don’t think it’s a necessary idea for my thesis. Instead, I think it’s enough to say that narrative is necessary for full integration into society and culture.

I ended up breaking the “Narrative structure is general knowledge” paragraph into two separate ones. I realized it was about two separate things–life story as form of communication and life story as meaning-making device. Both are important. Importantly, this separation made the life story as meaning-making device section much stronger. Also, ironically, “narrative structure is general knowledge” was deleted.

Unfortunately, this creates an awkward transition into adolescence and life story so that needs to be worked out still.

To do: It occurred to me today that it might be helpful to go through and write topic sentences for every paragraph and see where that gets me.

To read (or skim): Dan McAdam’s The Redemptive Self  and David M. Boje’s study on storytelling in an organization “The Storytelling Organization”

Amount written: 1/2 page