Storytelling
Storytelling has caught the human imagination for thousands of years. People everywhere have told stories to amuse, to teach, to remember, and just to pass the time. People started telling stories long before writing was invented.But people all over the world still tell one another stories out loud. A person who can tell a good story nearly always finds listeners.
Before people developed writing, storytelling was the most important way to pass along information. Anything a culture wanted to protect—its beliefs, its history, and its traditions—had to be told out loud. Each generation would tell the culture's stories to the next.Knowledge passed on in this method is called the spoken tradition. Even cultures that know how to write still pass along some information in this way.
In other cultures only special storytellers were trusted to do this important job. A culture's best storytellers had good memories. They could also make the stories very interesting, so people would listen and remember them. Sometimes people would sing the stories or tell them in the form of poems.
However, stories told aloud change over time as different people tell them. A storyteller might change a story in order to make it better. Or a teller may simply not remember all the details of a story. Unlike written stories, the spoken tradition is not created by any one person. Sometimes the stories are collected and written down long after they have been created.
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A. In this way the stories were passed along. B. In some cultures everyone would pass along the stories. C. Songs and poems can both make stories easier to remember. D. Instead, a whole culture helps shape the changing stories throughout history. E. Today stories are also written down in books and acted out in movies, TV shows, and plays. |
