The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels

The professional writing community and academic theorists of narrative have both developed rich theories of story structure, but there is comparatively little work on the cognitive validity of professional writing concepts or the practical utility of cognitive science theories. In this paper, we bridge this gap by examining the cognitive validity of “scene” and “sequel” theory from professional writing technique. Our contributions include a terminology of narrative unifying cognitive science and professional writing concepts, a cognitive science analysis of the professional writing concepts of “dramatic scene” and “dramatic sequel,” and a software library for extracting “narrative scenes” from narrative texts to facilitate further study in this area.