Storytelling is an artistic way to craft and share narratives that engage and entertain audiences and convey a message to them. It is about a structured story with character, events, settings, a theme, and narrative voice to captivate the readers or listeners.
But can artificial intelligence (AI) improve our storytelling skills? Yes, AI can help you generate ideas, create content, edit and refine, and do more with your stories. In fact, Google’s John Mueller recommends using AI to find inspiration or try new things out for writing.
Using AI is especially helpful for students studying abroad for effective storytelling, since they are not very experts in foreign languages. AI tools not only make them communicate effectively but also provide several other advantages. Read on to explore!
Why Is Storytelling Important?
Storytelling is important for international education in many ways:
It unlocks a student’s voice. Storytelling allows students to express themselves, their own identity, culture, and values in order to relate to others.
It boosts their confidence. Students can better involve themselves into various co-creation and innovation activities and share their ideas, opinions, and emotions.
It makes them interact better. They can collaborate with the other students and peers from different cultures and backgrounds and develop better literacy.
How AI Tools Enhance Storytelling?
Artificial intelligence can improve storytelling in many ways, such as:
Assist in Creative Writing
Struggling with the writer’s block? No need to worry anymore.
Artificial intelligence can provide you with a wide range of story ideas as per your requirements and prompt. They can ideate diverse themes, character concepts, and scenarios you can work on to explore new angles further.
In addition, AI can structure a story intelligently into different key components, such as introduction, conflict, climax, and resolution.
With an organized structure, students can better order their thoughts, decide a story outline with a logical flow, and identify any plot holes or inconsistencies. This way, students can refine their stories in engaging manners.
Examples of AI Tools to assist in written storytelling:
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Let us use one of the aforementioned tools, Summarizer.org’s AI Story Generator, to better elaborate this point! Describe the story topic in the topic input box, select your story type, lengths, and creativity, and click on the Generate button to get a story.
As you can see in the illustration below, the tool has generated a detailed story, highlighting the struggles of the character, his journey, and theme in a clear, precise manner.
Perform Cultural Analysis
Cultural differences, social norms, and personal values are a few important parts of storytelling that make one person’s story different from another.
AI can help students that are studying abroad understand these elements. These tools can process vast amounts of text and media (like news articles, social media posts, movies, etc.) to identify patterns and trends. Students can understand:
- What is important to the people?
- What are the accepted behaviors?
- What is popular or fashionable?
- What objects or ideas represent the culture?
Once understood, students can use this information to understand the host culture deeply and include it into their narratives. Moreover, learners can also comprehend what local people don’t like, and avoid using it in their stories.
Improve Language and Grammar
When it is written storytelling, it becomes especially important to focus on grammar and style corrections to present yourself as a credible source.
While your eyes may not catch errors in your written stories, AI tools can. They catch real-time instances for grammar and style corrections, highlight mistance, and offer suggestions to improve the sentence structure and clarity.
So, if you’re writing in a second language, don’t forget to use an AI tool to improve the language and grammar of your stories. Make your stories polished and professional!
Examples of AI Tools to improve language:
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In the below image, Grammarly is showing errors in the story we generated above along with the suggestion to improve clarity and readability.
Adapt Context
Students that study abroad often need to translate their stories into the local language so the readers there can understand them. In case you don’t know the local language, AI translation tools can help you achieve this goal.
During the translation process, these tools keep the original meaning the same along with the context and expressions. This capability bridges language gaps and enables students to share their stories with a global audience and incorporate diverse perspectives.
Moreover, if someone leaves feedback on your stories in their own language, you can translate it back to yours in order to understand it and make the necessary changes.
Examples of AI Tools to translate text:
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Conclusion
So, yes, AI tools can improve storytelling skills significantly for students studying abroad. These tools can provide fresh ideas, organize stories into clear key parts like introduction, middle, and end, and suggest improvements for better flow.
They also analyse various texts and media types to make students understand cultural differences and incorporate local elements into their stories.
For language learners, AI tools like Grammarly and Reverso.net correct grammar and style mistakes and make their writing clearer and more professional.
Additionally, AI translation tools like Google Translate and DeepL allow students to share their stories in local languages. They bridge communication gaps and reach a wider audience.
