The Power of Storytelling

By: Taylor Johannigman

Storytelling is an important part of our society. It holds a lot of power and for countless reasons. One of the most important is allowing people to connect with one another. It is part of our human needs to have a desire for connection with other humans. Storytelling creates a personal connection as one shares more about who they are with another—this can help be the foundation to build relationships. The power of storytelling can also result from its ability to persuade one’s emotions. Based off of word choice, sentence structure, and tone of voice, stories can influence the perception of how a story is interpreted. This applies directly to cultural and heritage tourism because it helps to break down the divide between travelers and locals in an area.

As a result, storytelling can be influential in the workforce as well. Marketing is a large way that businesses and products can persuade consumers. The same goes with the power of stories. If an individual uses a product, goes to a hotel or destination, they can share those stories with their friends which will result in them having a positive or negative association with that product or destination. In the same way that stories connect people, they also connect associations to other things. This is why storytelling can be such an influential part of tourism because people are more trusting of real people and their experiences. A tourist who hears from a local why they love where they live seems to be way more appealing to travelers than someone whose main purpose is to sell something.

The ways in stories are crafted is essential for engaging and communicating with an audience. As I mentioned before, tone of voice and word choice are some of the most important ways that stories can influence a listener/reader. For example, the words ‘clique’ and ‘group’ both have the same denotative meaning. However, the word ‘clique’ has a negative association to the word. This can be used by the storyteller to persuade the audience in a specific way. This applies to cultural and heritage tourism because as individuals tell stories have power over their word choice and their abilities to influence travelers to come to the region are dependent on their word choice and ways of communicating—thus creating the power of storytelling.