Benefits of Telling Stories

Storytelling is the giving of a gift, the sharing of an emotion, the passing on of knowledge and understanding, one to the other.

Storytelling helps to facilitate learning without the burden of having to teach.  Story can be based on legend, myth, history, or even on science, mathematics, music, or the family.   Stories can help the audience to step into the past, into other cultures, into the imagination, worlds so different from their own that they are helped to better understand their place in this world and this time.   The listener learns how to listen, how to focus her thoughts.  Storytelling can help both the listener and the teller to better understand love, friendship, fear, hatred, being young, or growing older.  Both the teller and the listener develop better social skills, sharing, giving, and caring.  Communication skills are improved, those of diction, the use of language, phrasing, sentence structure, the unfolding of a theme.  The teller improves his memory skills, his concentration, his ability to imagine, his sense of rhythm and of order.  He improves his study and research skills.  Storytelling develops a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, a sense of belonging, along with an awareness of self, of others, of concepts, and of nature. Storytelling is a joyful experience, an act of theatre on a small yet grand scale, a true celebration and a gift of love.   Thank you, Margaret, for inviting me to share my thoughts on why I tell stories.  And thank you as well to Gail De Vos whose list I had already read and in part had made my own by entering them into my notes. The following  contain more reasons why to tell stories: 1) Margaret Read MacDonald, The Storyteller's Start-Up Book, (Little Rock Arkansas: August House Inc., 1993), 101-102. 2) Spencer G Shaw, First Steps: Storytelling with Young Listeners, in Start Early for an Early Start: You and the Young Child (Chicago: American Library Association, 1976), 41-42. 3) Pamela J. Cooper and Rives Collins, Look What Happened to Frog: Storytelling in Education (Scottsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick Publishers, 1992), 11-20. 4) Gail De Vos, Storytelling for Young Adults: Techniques and Treasury (Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1991), 2-7.