More specifically it constitutes literary genre with its history, its demands, and its market.”[3] Jeff Todd Titon also refers to personal narrative as being very similar to a life story.
Conversational interaction meaning face-to-face verbal and story text is referring to the actual written narrative.
The sociolinguistic approach includes different techniques such as intensifiers, comparators, correlatives, and explicative to fully evaluate narratives.
The moral proposition present in all first-person narratives is, "I am a good person,"[11] or that the speaker acted wrong, and learned what was right.
[12] The notion that "this happened to me" is the justification of storytelling rights for all personal narrative,[10] defence of one's actions is an integral part of this moral negotiation.
More than any other topic of personal narrative, one talks more giving evidence of fairness or unfairness, drawing sympathy, approval, exoneration, understanding, or amusement from their audience.
[2] Narrative is a paramount resource for forming personal identity by oneself, as well as showing and negotiating the self with others.
Personal narratives make a statement: "what you must know about me," and these stories are traded more frequently as traders grow closer, and reach milestones in the relationships.
[2] There is an obligation to trading personal narratives, an expectation of being kept in the loop that Harvey Sachs calls a symptom of "being close.
"[10] Gillian Bennet writes about 'bereavement stories' and how personal narratives take private experience and shape it into public from in accordance with traditional attitudes and expectations.
[10] Power structures have been noted as an inherent influence on personal narratives gathered and reported by ethnographers.
It is argued life histories guided by questions are not personal narratives, but fall somewhere between biography and autobiography because the ethnographer helps the teller shape their story,[7] and thus they cease to function for only the speaker.
[2] Scholars studying the performance of personal narrative (PN) are interested in the presentation of the storytelling event.
[15] In reference to the performance of PN, Richard Bauman states that “the act of communication is put on display, objectified, lifted out to a degree from its contextual surroundings, and opened up to scrutiny by an audience.” Performance of a PN occurs in “natural speech,” that is, the ways in which the speaker uses language to convey a message.
As evident in all forms of communication, all performance is located, executed, and established as meaningful specifically within its “socially defined situational contexts” therefore the language must change with its surroundings in order to be relevant.
[17] These modifications to the performance based on the teller's recognition of the listener's limited interpretive ability, display an effort to ensure the success of the narrative.
Gary Butler provides an example of how a teller may deliver the performance of a PN: Well you heard… his grandfather... his... his brother had drowned...
The teller frames the PN with a distinct beginning, “Well you heard…” and familiarizes the audience with the shared knowledge of how the grandfather's brother had drowned.
According to Linde, “narrative is among the most important social resources for creating and maintaining personal identity.
[8] This style of analysis focuses on the temporal sequencing of events, as told by the storyteller, the recurring patterns in stories, and the isolation of structural units at the clause level.
An example of this is Labov's Oral Narrative of Personal Experience, in which he interviewed around six hundred people throughout the United States from many different backgrounds, yet all with limited education not exceeding high school.
[19] From this study, Labov constructed his structure of narratives, which can be applied to most stories: Abstract, Orientation, Complication, Evaluation, Resolution, and Coda.
Some narratives have an additional element known as the coda, which is a device used to return the sequence of conversation or performance back to the present or the situation in which the storytelling event was taking place.
De Fina and Georgakopoulou's Narrative as Text and Structure provided a clear summary for criticisms of the "Labovian Model".
The primary basis of De Fina's criticisms was the application of a model which attempted to combine "a formal syntactic characterization of narrative units with a functional definition of story constituents".
[9] The issue of coding story-texts using the Labovian Model was its strict focus on formation and structure, especially for the evaluation part of the story.
[9] Also, the ambiguity of clauses fitting into certain classifications, based on certain statements with evaluative characteristics (ones that shed light or reflected on the protagonist) create larger problems when decoding stories that are not well told or structured, and appear more chaotic and less continuous.
Labov's model, due to its basic application to mono-logic storytelling, lacks coding categories that could incorporate interactive processes to the discourse of narration.
[20] Sacks defines the preface sequence as an instance that can take a minimum of two-turns, a proposal or request to tell a joke or a story by the teller, and the response from the listener or audience.
[20] The final unit, the response sequence is the recipients turn for reaction to the completion of the joke or story, generally highlighted by its punchline.