Anecdotes
Anecdotes are short, personal stories or accounts that are often used to illustrate a point or convey a message. In the study of languages and linguistics, anecdotes can be valuable for understanding how language is used in real-life situations and for providing examples of language variation, usage, and change. They offer insights into the cultural and social aspects of language.
4 Key excerpts on "Anecdotes"
eBook - ePubResearching Lived Experience
Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy
- Max van Manen(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Any object that cannot adopt such modality therefore cannot meaningfully enter the conversational relation. It does not speak to him and therefore cannot be seen, says van den Berg. This is how van den Berg uses, among other things, the anecdote as a device for making comprehensible the phenomenon of conversational relation which every human being maintains with his or her world. What van den Berg wants to show by way of anecdote and phenomenological explication is that the human being not only stands in a certain conversational relation to the world—the human being really is this relation. Anecdotes, in the sense that they occur in the phenomenological writings of, for example, Sartre, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty are not to be understood as mere illustrations to "butter up" or "make more easily digestible" a difficult or boring text. Anecdote can be understood as a methodological device in human science to make comprehensible some notion that easily eludes us. Webster's definition of anecdote is "a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident." And the Oxford Dictionary defines anecdote as "secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history." It speaks of the narrative of an incident or event as "being in itself interesting or striking." The term derives from the Greek meaning "things unpublished," "something not given out." And indeed, Cicero (and later Renaissance scholars as well) used to describe some of his unpublished manuscripts as Anecdotes, "things not given out." Anecdotes are social products. In everyday life the anecdote usually begins its course as part of an oral tradition. Often, it is originally a fragment of the biography of some famous or well-known person...
eBook - ePubInventive Methods
The Happening of the Social
- Celia Lury, Nina Wakeford, Celia Lury, Nina Wakeford(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 Anecdote Mike Michael Here is a small selection of dictionary definitions of ‘anecdote’: A short narrative of an incident of private life. (Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, Revised Edition, 1982) A short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person. (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd Edition, Revised, 2005) A short usually amusing account of an incident, esp. a personal or biographical one. (Collins English Dictionary, 9th Edition, 2007) Within these definitions, we have some of the key features of the anecdote on display. It is a story of some sort, though there is an implication that this is about an actual incident, thus it is not simply a fictional narrative, but possibly a report. The narrative is short – once more perhaps connoting reportage – which suggests a focused form of accounting, a pithiness that excludes extraneous detail in order to highlight the importance, or core, of the incident. As such, the incident is something that is worth recounting – it might provide insight, it might yield knowledge. But what about? After all, this is ‘an incident of private life’ or an account that is ‘a personal or biographical one’. Might it tell us something about the participants? Do we gain a better impression of this or that person and so a sounder grasp of their behaviour on a wider or public stage? Moreover, the anecdote is said usually to be amusing. Does that mean that we get a sense of the ironies that assail the particular characters in the anecdote? Or does the anecdote afford a renewed, or even novel, insight into the character of private life itself? But notice (and this is something these dictionary definitions do not address): an anecdote is, arguably, for the telling. Unlike other narratives that can languish in dusty tomes or loiter in the back of one's mind, Anecdotes, perhaps because of the nature of the incident, seem to demand to be told, to be put into circulation...
eBook - ePubRecontextualized Knowledge
Rhetoric – Situation – Science Communication
- Olaf Kramer, Markus Gottschling, Olaf Kramer, Markus Gottschling(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
...These features are not easily operationalized in a text and could require a more in-depth, content analysis of the entire speech. However, relevance is considered when interpreting possible (retention) effects and variety in use of anecdote in section 4. Tab. 2: Overview of the definition and characteristics of the anecdote as used in this analysis. Working definition Characteristics / indicators (recognizable text features for labelling) An anecdote is a short story that: The text marked as anecdote: is brief is not interrupted by another part of the speech contains one or more story characters contains one or more story characters, for example marked by (a change in) the story perspective in the text (e.g., from general information or ‘they’ to an ‘I’ / first-person perspective) is a narrative with a story development from beginning to end contains elements of narrative structure, such as orientation, a sequence of events, and a wrap-up Apart from the definition and characteristics described in table 2, several other labelling agreements were made to systematize the analysis by different raters. For instance, examples of text signals to recognize the techniques (e.g., the transition to another perspective in the speech text) and the exact starting and ending point of text that was to be coded were recorded in the instruction. The speech and presentation texts from both corpora were systematically coded via the data analysis software Atlas.ti. Two researchers independently analyzed four speeches from both corpora (eight in total), using the labelling instructions. This analysis showed a substantial inter-rater reliability between the raters (κ=.69, p <.001). 4 Results: Frequency and Examples of Anecdote Use How do TED speakers and researchers apply Anecdotes in their presentations? This section discusses the results of the rhetorical analysis...
eBook - ePubNarrative and Genre
Contexts and Types of Communication
- Paul Thompson, Paul Thompson(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Some of these Anecdotes which he retells about other people are clearly fictional. 36 But in telling of his own experiences, he can use this form either simply to lend point and wit to an already tragicomic episode (as with the recruiting office incident), or in a more complex way to represent what is troubled or conflictual (as in the account of his call-up). 37 In these two cases, a professional writer from the upper middle class and a storyteller from the lower working class each draw on related popular cultural forms as narrative resources. For both, dramatization serves to undermine in retrospect an abusive authority. Within these dramatized episodes, both Graves and Hewins contrast the truth-telling power of demotic speech against the falsity and sometimes deadly deceit of the written word. 38 * * * The wider meaning of the life story, however, is conveyed not by the individual Anecdotes, but by their weaving together. Within the broader narrative, elements of music-hall form comprise one important strand, generating meaning through their interaction with Anecdotes (or songs) from other generic forms. It is in the juxtaposition of Anecdotes, the links and elisions between them, the cross-references which they establish in the reader’s mind that Hewins’s story – the way he renders his life intelligible, and with it that of his fellows in Stratford – is told. 39 In order to explore how such a narrative works, I have chosen to analyse one relatively self-contained sequence within the life story, which recounts his return home from the First World War. 40 This passage possesses its own coherence as a particular segment of the life story (since all the Anecdotes are tied to the period and the events immediately after his return), while it also serves as a climax, a drawing together of themes present throughout the text. I shall concentrate here largely on a close reading of the language and structure of this particular sequence...
