Telling Your Story: Testing for Yourself

From the profile of an INFJ or Advocate.


Previously: Building Yourself Up.

Below are carefully selected tests and activities for you to explore. You have discretion over how much or how little you do here. In every instance, you can do as much or as little as you like. Remember, however, that the more detail you have, the clearer the overall meaning will be.

The goal is to write your story. These tests and activities might help you shine a light on yourself. What comes together (perhaps with that gestalt click!)when you look at these data? What emerges from the details? What picture do you see — and what are the thousand words, so to speak, that go with that picture?

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Telling Your Story: Building Yourself Up

From the profile of an INTJ or Architect.


Previously: Telling Your Story: Starting Notes.

Let’s talk about Lego bricks1 and how to tell a story.

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  1. The debate over whether to pluralize this as Legos or not is fascinating. Technically, it’s LEGO, all capital letters, and LEGO is the plural, as well. Trying to change the way people speak is difficult, however

Ink Blot Descriptions

Header image from Watchmen, selected as one of the best novels all of all time by TIME magazine.


Be sure you’ve carefully read the lecture that uses artwork and optical illusions to demonstrate how your brain processes information and creates meaning. This process is at the root of everything you learn, from the way you compile evidence for class portfolios to the way you relate to a literary character to the way you make a three-dimensional cube flatten into a diamond-like shape.

Now we will look at descriptive writing, which is rarely isolated as its own mode of discourse at your age. To help, we need a visual: Rorschach inkblots.

Using Google to learn about Rorschach is likely to introduce you to comic book anti-heroes1 and questionable personality tests, so anyone interested in the history should visit this National Library of Medicine article.

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  1. That link exists to introduce anyone curious and motivated enough to find this footnote to Ground News, an excellent way to navigate media bias and factuality. 

Telling Your Story: Starting Notes

Header image from Charles Allan Gilbert’s All Is Vanity (1892).


Each student enters this classroom with a different history and different goal. Some of you love to read and write, and you look forward to improving your skills and experiencing new texts. Some of you, on the other hand, have hated English classes since you became aware of them, and you want only to escape — by climbing out the back window, maybe, if that’s what it takes.

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