33 Days To Nieman

Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy: Narrative is everywhere a major genre of verbal art, occurring all the way from primary oral cultures into high literacy and electronic information processing. In a sense narrative is paramount among all verbal art forms because of the way it underlies so many other art forms, often even the most abstract. Human knowledge comes out of time. ... The elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it really comes into being and exists, embedded in the flow of time. Developing a story line is a way of dealing with this flow."