NSTD.Preface:6 - Source synthesis, coverage and relations

Narrative studies supplies several complementary contributions. Narratology distinguishes story, discourse, voice and focalization; cognitive narrative research examines event comprehension and reader processing; science communication makes the tension between engagement and supported claims visible; natural-language generation and narrative planning distinguish content, order, realization and control. Learning research contributes conditions for retrieval, spacing, interleaving and transfer. The Source Use And Refresh Map and each pattern’s SoTA-Echoing section state the adopted contributions and their limits.

The synthesis uses those distinctions as methods for recognizable work. It adapts staged planning into a revisable cycle and separates product evaluation from generation history. A purely stylistic account would miss source and dependency failures; a universal formal-admission procedure would add unnecessary work before ordinary explanation. Domain sources remain necessary when the proposed use exceeds a source’s actual reach or a newer result changes the method.

The publication foregrounds selection, order, event and mechanism support, viewpoint, engagement, evaluation, generation and learning routes. Its teaching, fiction, mathematical and live-event examples demonstrate different uses; they do not bound the repertoire or establish complete domain coverage. Genre craft, the full history of narratology, a complete learning-science curriculum, generation algorithms, legal permissions and formal metric calibration require their appropriate sources or more specialized methods.

The emphasis on explicit source relations can favor analytic and technical work. Expressive aims such as mood, voice and imaginative discovery remain legitimate; choose a fidelity or reconstruction criterion only when that use requires it. A provisional draft can help discover both the subject and the purpose. Actual field effectiveness and learning remain questions for observations qualified by their conditions.

This DPF depends on FPF’s general distinctions and adds narrative-domain methods. FPF does not depend on NSTD. The DPF Relations section explains the specific dependencies, teaching-publication relations and useful returns. In an architecture-mediated explanation, the reader may need to return from narrative to a description or view, then to the modeled structure and observations. A directly sourced explanation returns to its relevant material. Each representation may omit relations; inspect those omissions when they affect the use.