Narrative Terminology
Overview | Shared Vocabulary | Glossary of Terms | Citations
Definitions used by those who study — and those who produce — narrative texts.
Applied narratology
Content marketing
Designed storytelling
Ethics
Ethical storytelling
Impact storytelling
Narrative change
Narrative landscape
Narrative literacy
Narrative power
Narrative research
Narrative strategy
Narrative theory
Narratology
Story
Storylistening
Text
Communications Practitioners
Organizational storytelling
Public interest communications
Narrative
Stories narrated by an organization. Learn more.
“The development and implementation of science-based, strategic communication campaigns with the goal of achieving significant and sustained positive behavioral change on issues that transcend the particular interests of any single organization.” Center for Public Interest Communications
“Ethical storytelling is a practice within impact storytelling that adheres to policies and practices introduced to prevent harm caused by the impact of the story collection or telling (publication) processes.” — Fiona J. Ramsey, No Lip Service.
“Getting ethical storytelling right means: Creating better, more authentic stories that connect people of different backgrounds and disrupt inequitable power relations, such as those around race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality; Representing lived experiences more accurately; Encouraging mutual respect; and Preserving the dignity of those whose story is being told.” — Africa No Filter
“…’impact storytelling’ — defined as intentional, strategic storytelling designed to advance social impact goals.” — Spotlight on Impact Storytelling, p. 4.
“Telling stories — about a real person — that describe the impact of an organization’s work, narrated by that organization, and for the benefit of that organization.” — Fiona J Ramsey, No Lip Service.
“Narratives are the ideas and themes that permeate collections of stories. The ideas can appear in any structure, and are articulated and refined repeatedly in a variety of stories and messages.” — Narrative Initiative
“Narratives are systems of stories that shape our attitudes and behaviors and help us make meaning of the world around us.” — The Math Narrative Project
“Narratives (are) collections of stories circulating within a society that convey themes, frames, and worldviews that are collectively recognized, understood, and embraced by its members.” — BLIS Collective
“A narrative consists of a collection or body of stories which together convey a common worldview or meaning — an interpretation of the world and how it works.” The Narrative Directory.
“Narratives are sets or patterns of stories that contain beliefs about the way the world works. They provide meaning and a lens through which to intepret issues, causes, and life events.” ORS Impact
“Narratives are patterns of stories that are held by individuals or groups and contain beliefs about the way the world works. They can be harmful, beneficial, or a mixture.” Liz Manne Strategy
“Narrative change is an effort to counter, modify, or replace existing narratives by creating and deploying new or different narratives.” — The Math Narrative Project
“Narrative change rests on the premise that reality is socially constructed through narrative, and that in order to bring about change in the world we need to pay attention to the ways in which this change takes place.” — The Narrative Directory.
“Narrative change is a change in the narratives that circulate within public discourse: either in the set of narratives in circulation (ie. which narratives are used) or in their relative prevalence (i.e. which narraties re used more or less frequently), or both.” ORS Impact
“Narrative change aims to shift culture by replacing a dominant narrative with a counter-narrative.” FrameWorks UK
“A narrative landscape is a map of the harmful and helpful narratives that affect how people think about, talk about, and make decisions about your cause.” — Narrative Initiative
“narrative literacy is the capacity to emplot a sequence of events into a rounded whole, and to understand others doing so.” Moenander, Alber and Thirlway
“The storying of experiences.” — Christina Romero-Ivanova, Tara Kingsley and Lance Mason.
“Understanding how stories function and their effects at individual and collective levels” Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig
“Narrative power refers to the ability to shape and control the stories told within a society, including which ones are told, who tells them, and how they are interpreted.” — Shanelle Matthews and Marzena Zukowska
“The ability to tell stories that shift the mental models and cultural mindsets that define our cultural norms.” — The Narrative Directory
“Narrative research is the study of circulating stories, where they come from, how they spread and coalesce, and how they impact public sentiment, policy, and broader culture. Applied narrative research encompasses all of this, with the crucial addition that it is designed, from start to finish, to serve movement strategy, with the ultimate goal of deepening collective power.” — BLIS Collective
“Narrative strategy is the practice of sharing connected stories to forge, spread, and reinforce beneficial narratives and counter harmful ones.” — Liz Manne
“Narrative theory starts from the assumption that narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with fundamental elements of our experience, such as time, process, and change, and it proceeds from this assumption to study the distinctive nature of narrative and its various structures, elements, uses, and effects.” — Project Narrative.
“Narratology is a humanities discipline dedicated to the study of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation.” — the living handbook of narratology
“Narratology is the study of the form and functioning of narrative.” Gerald Prince.
“Narratology as a field of study is the ensemble of theories of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacles, events — of cultural artefacts that tell a story.” Mieke Bal
“The chronological series of actions and events deemed to precede emplotment that can be retrospectively reconstructed from the emplotted narrative” — Genevieve Liveley
“a causal account of something happening that includes entities with agency, can be distributed or shared, and in which both form and content generate affect and cognition. Stories can be textual or non-textual.” — Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig
“a text is a finite, structured whole, composed of signs.” Mieke Bal
“A story describes an event or sequence of events that include characters, conflict, and imagery. It has a beginning, middle and end.” — Narrative Initiative
“Stories consist of characters, joined in some common problem in a temporal trajectory (plot) leading towards resolution within a particular setting or context.” — The Narrative Directory
“Stories are an essential part of how we process, understand and interpret our life experiences.” ORS Impact
“the theory and practice of gathering narrative evidence to inform deicion-making, especially in relation to public reasoning, as part of a pluralistic evidence base.” — Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig
Narrative Scholars
“‘(W)e define applied narratology as the theoretical and empirical investigation of realworld practices in which narrative is a central issue.” Moenandar, Karttunen and Ovaska, 2024.
“We define applied narratology as the transfer of insights and findings of the academic study of narrative to storytelling practices.” Moenandar, Liveley and Macrae, 2026.
“‘Content marketing’ is a general term used to refer to the marketing communications tactic of sharing useful and valuable content — texts, films, audio — for the purpose of promoting a particular organization, product or individual to a specific audience.” Cecilia Thirlway
“Designed storytelling is defined as story- and emotions-based messaging designed to reach particular kinds of audiences for specific kinds of purposes linked to broader discourses and local ideologies.” Karina Giaxoglou
“Narrative ethics explores the intersections between the domain of stories and storytelling and that of moral values.” — Living Handbook of Narratology
“narrative ethics is in itself an interdisciplinary area of research, most commonly understood either as a subfield of narrative studies or as a particular approach to ethics.” Hanna Meretoja.
“It is both the charm and the challenge of narrative that no one discipline can define precisely what it is or does, though surely each contributes to our understanding. Some scholars – narratologists, for instance – study the structures of stories in and of themselves. Others analyze specific narratives according to established methodologies, from the literary scholar’s “close reading” to the sociologist’s discourse analysis. Some, such as qualitative researchers, look at narrative as a form of data; for others, it is an approach to interpreting such data.” Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative
“Narrative… may be defined as the representation of real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence.” Gerald Prince.
“The representation (as product and process, object and act, structure and structuration) of one or more real or fictive events communicated by one, two, or several (more or less overt) narrators to one, two, or several (more or less overt) narratees.” Gerald Prince.
“One will define narrative without difficulty as the representation of an event or sequence of events, real or fictitious, by means of language and, more particularly, by means of written language.” — Gérard Gennette
Marie-Laure offers a “fuzzy-set” definition of 8 conditions that “allows variable degrees of membership” relating to spatial, temporal, mental, and formal and pragmatic dimensions. Full quote.
“we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative — stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on.” — Jerome Bruner
“A narrative is a representation of a possible world in a linguistic and/or visual medium, at whose centre there are one or several protagonists of an anthropomorphic nature who are existentially anchored in a temporal and spatial sense and who (mostly) perform goal-directed actions (action and plot structure).” Monika Fludernik
“Narrative: taken to be synonymous with story, and therefore not used in its noun form in the book” — Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig