We live in a society where there is an unprecedented amount of information, which requires us to input (receive) and output (send) information effectively. With this in mind, in this blog, I will talk about the following two types of storytelling based on observation and presentation skills:

1. Storytelling by comedian
2. Storytelling by Journalist.

1. Storytelling by comedian
Since I came to Mongolia, I have more free time by myself (need to meet more people, though) , so I started watching a Japanese TV show called “Suberanai Hanashi” (Unfailing Funny Story).
The rule is very simple: a bunch of skillful comedians gather around the table, and a dice with every participant’s name will be rolled, and the person indicated by the dice will tell a guaranteed funny and real story. It’s been going on more than 10 years, and many different comedians want to participate to show and prove their funny storytelling skills.

The beauty of this program is its simplicity, commonality and joy, because they observed what have happened in their dairy lives which can happen to everyone (input) and tell the story in a funny way to make others laugh (output).

If you are interested, please take a look at the link of this TV show translated in English. I wonder if Japanese sensitive nuance can be translated, but I think someone who translated this made a big effort anyway.

2. Storytelling by Journalist
Since I started having a reading habit, I was always interested in a Journalism because of its beauty of influencing readers by writing news. So a few weeks ago, I decided to take free online course of “Introduction to Journalism” offered by Futurelearn University of Strathclyd.

Through this six-week long course (now half way through), I learned a lot in terms of what makes better news and storytelling. And news doesn’t have to be a striking disaster of corruption but it can be anything around you (input), which is same as the storytelling by comedian. Likewise, you need to have skills to tell your story (output) with some basic rules such as uniqueness, freshness, simplicity, clarity, etc. Unlike the comedian’s story, however, sometimes you need to be persistence to get information you want.

I’ve done several online courses before, and some of them were not successfully mainly because there was no real interaction with lecturer and peers and difficulty in keeping myself motivated, so it’s me who has to find time to keep doing the tasks offered by the lessons. I think taking lessons at the same time of each day will help to establish a habit.

This time, I learned that

As long as you observe well on a dairy basis, you can find something interesting, and you also need to know how to tell your story creatively, so I should go out more and keep that in mind. This can be true in telling a funny story and writing interesting journal.

Nowadays, we have many options to learn through free online course, and you can get something out of it as long as you keep yourself engaged.