From Knowing to Telling: The Development of Children's Scripts, Stories, and Personal Narratives

What does it take to produce a coherent and cohesive narrative? We view narrative production as a cognitive and linguistic task that draws on many kinds of knowledge—for example, general knowledge about events, memories of specific episodes, knowledge about people and typical social interactions, knowledge about structural characteristics of different narrative genres, knowledge about verb tense and linguistic connectives, and knowledge about the listener’s needs. The task that a narrator faces is how to coordinate this knowledge in producing a narrative. According to White (1980) , “narrative might well be considered the solution to a problem of general concern, namely, the problem of translating knowing into telling ” (p. 1).