Secondary school is often the last time students are asked to write a story. Yet, searching "narratives" in Google Scholar produces 2,450,000 hits. "Importance of storytelling" produces another 300,000 hits. Some fields in which storytelling is deemed important include academic writing, literacy development, anthropology, criminal prosecution and defense, healthcare education, business management, strategic planning, politics, religion, and personal development.

This talk will reflect on whether storytelling is an important program objective at the university level and, if so, whether students should be offered the opportunity to practice this skill by writing their own fictional stories. Three semesters of classroom experience will be considered empirically and the problems of assessing creative work will be discussed.