Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / This thesis contains two short stories and an excerpt from my novel in progress. I wrote most of it over the harsh winter of 2017-2018 in Boston, MA, as part of the creative writing MFA program of Boston University. / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

This study examined the recall of televised stories for younger (4-6 years) and older (7-9 years) children with and without ADHD under two different viewing conditions (toys present/toys absent). Each child watched two Rugrats television programs, once with toys present and once with toys absent. Immediately after viewing a program, the child completed a free recall of the observed story. Nonreferred childrens recall increased more than ADHD childrens as importance level increased, and older nonreferred children recalled more information overall than older children with ADHD. For the toys condition, children with ADHD had smaller correlations between the story units recalled and the order of these units in the story than did nonreferred children. Children with ADHD demonstrated multiple difficulties in story comprehension. They were less sensitive to thematic importance and they produced less coherent recalls than their nonreferred peers.

Narration, or storytelling, is an important aspect of language. Narrative skills have practical and social importance; for example, children who tell good stories receive attention and approval from their peers. When children accurately recount events surrounding an injury or dispute, vital information is passed to parents and teachers. Additionally, early childhood narrative skills are moderately correlated with reading comprehension in primary grades. Because narration is socially and academically valued, language interventionists often address it. The research literature on narrative intervention has most often included school-aged participants and those with language or learning difficulties. Only a small number of studies have investigated narrative intervention with preschoolers, and the supporting evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive. Outcomes frequently targeted include narrative story grammar (e.g., character, problem, action, consequence) and general language outcomes (e.g., length of story, mean length of communication unit, and total number of words). Results have been generally positive; however, the methodological quality of studies is poor. Therefore, few firm conclusions can be drawn regarding the efficacy of narrative interventions. Because of its potential and popularity, the effect of narrative intervention on a range of populations needs to be examined systematically through high quality research. This study evaluated the effects of a narrative intervention on story retelling and story generation using a multiple baseline design with five target participants. We delivered narrative intervention in a small group arrangement. Materials, activities, and instructor assistance were adjusted systematically within session to facilitate increasingly independent practice of story retells and personal story generations. Results suggest that narrative intervention improved participants' narrative retell and personal generation performance based on Index of Narrative Complexity (INC) scores. All five target participants made substantial gains in narrative retelling, demonstrated improved pre-intervention to post-intervention INC scores for personal generations, and these improvements maintained when assessed following a 2-week break. In addition, we documented growth in general language measures such as number of communication units, mean length of utterance, number of different words, and total number of words.

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to compare preschool children's comprehension of a story after either enacting the story or participating in an art project, and (b) to qualitatively describe the children's interactions during the more interactive story enactment instruction. Twenty children from two Head Start classrooms were told the stories as a class, and then participated in either an art project (AP) or story enactment (SE) in small groups. The children in each classroom each heard three stories followed by the AP condition, and three followed by the SE condition. The children's comprehension of the story was tested after the story was initially read, and again after the AP or SE by having the children participate in a joint retelling of the story in which the child was asked to fill in several pieces of information as the examiner told the story. Children's comprehension of the story was significantly better after receiving story enactment instruction than after art project instruction, although significant variability was present. Children's interactions during the story enactment were evaluated using a rubric. Children's participation varied from story to story. Smaller group sizes and repeated enactments were beneficial to most children's participation in the story.

No description available.

The short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern kinds of coherence. This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Book and Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist themes and styles. The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room—arguing that such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this too-long neglected literary genre. / text

The Story Art and Tech merges storytelling and technology together to elucidate the animated filmmaking process for readers who are interested in animation. The author's path to animation director is traced from beginning to end starting with writing ideas and moving on to forming storyboards and animatics to completing animations for the screen. Two 3D short animated films and three storyboards with animatics are presented. A storyboard primarily shows the audience the thought process of storytelling; it previsualizes a script or an idea. It is then narrated into moving images called animatics; a preliminary version of a film. Animatics are important references for animators to animate shots and characters. Eventually the rest of the animation pipeline makes it into a final product: an animated film. As an artist who writes stories and animates them with 3D technology, presenting how a storyboard is made into an animated film is the most immediate way to inform the audience of this process with entertaining stories. In this paper, an extended discussion of the author's creative thought and development processes are presented with two distinct parts: storytelling and technology. / Master of Fine Arts / The Story Art and Tech shows how storyboards are made into movies. The author utilizes storytelling and media technology together such as 3D animation and game-engine rendering. It is the author's intention to make entertaining animated movies for the audience as a prospective animation director. When a director comes up with a movie script or an idea, the quickest way to visualize it is to sketch it out on a storyboard. This profession is called a 'story artist.' Story artists simplify characters and backgrounds on the boards to catch a glimpse of the final movie. To make the storyboards more detailed, story artists make them into 'animatics', which show more animated images and characters. Animatics are then taken by the 'animators' to animate everything in the final phase which is eventually produced as an animated film. In entirety, concept arts, storyboards, and animatics are presented together to show the audience the 'behind the scenes' of animated films. This helps them understand the thought process of the author and how she moved from story idea to completed animation. In this paper, the journey of a filmmaker in the animation field is extensively discussed.

This study examined how 22 children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus (SBH) and 22 matched control children with the same vocabulary age (VA) performed on story retelling and story generation tasks. The children were asked to retell two stories of different lengths (Stein and Glenn's Melvin, the Skinny Mouse and The Tiger's Whisker) and generate two stories from different stimuli (wordless picture book and verbal story starter). Analyses were conducted in terms of global narrative organization (story structure), local connection of ideas (cohesion), and productivity (number of words and utterances). Two-way ANOVAs were conducted to analyze how the stories and story tasks (retell versus generation) influenced the two groups' narrative performance. When comparisons were made between the two groups' performances on the individual stories, the children with SBH generally produced shorter and less complex stories than their VA peers. Story-by-group interaction effects showed that the children with SBH produced fewer story grammar elements than their VA peers on the retell stories but not on the generated ones. When comparisons were made between the two groups' performances on the type of task (story retell versus generation), results showed that for story retelling, the children with SBH produced stories that contained fewer words and utterances than their VA peers, significantly fewer story grammar components, and more correct cohesive ties. For the story generation task, the children with SBH produced significantly fewer reactions and total story grammar components. Story-by-group interaction effects showed that the children with SBH produced fewer reactions and total different words than the VA group on the story retell task but not the generation task. The results suggest that children with SBH function differently from their vocabulary age peers in some dimensions of narrative production. When the children with SBH encountered the retelling tasks or the more structured generation story, they tended to produce stories that were shorter than those of their VA peers.

Bakgrund: Äldreboendet är en plats som utgör den boendes livsmiljö, vilket även innefattar relationer. Då vårdpersonalen är ständigt närvarande kring de äldre, blir skapandet av relationer dem emellan en följd av livet på boendet. I den transpersonella omsorgen har kommunikationen en central position, och att ta sig tid och lyssna och att lära känna varandra i den gemensamma vardagen har både ett etiskt och relationellt värde. Problem: Den relationella aspekten av berättande beskrivs sällan ur den äldres perspektiv, utan dess förtjänster relateras ofta till vårdpersonalens möjlighet att ge personcentrerad vård. Hur upplever de äldre berättande i vårdrelationen och vad upplever de att berättande tillför? Syfte: Att beskriva äldres upplevelser av berättande i vårdrelationer på äldreboende. Metod: Systematisk litteraturstudie med beskrivande syntes, baserad på kvalitativa studier. Resultaten tyder på att äldre genom att berätta om upplevelser och erfarenheter för någon som lyssnar aktivt kan uppleva känslor av stärkt identitet och gemenskap, vilket i sin tur främjar upplevelser av mening och ökad livskvalitet. Slutsatsen är att vårdpersonal genom att visa intresse och skapa utrymme för berättande i vårdrelationen har potential att främja äldres välbefinnande.

No description available.