{"id":259,"date":"2006-12-03T23:56:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-03T23:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=259"},"modified":"2015-01-14T18:35:30","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T18:35:30","slug":"social-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=259","title":{"rendered":"Social Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/12\/supersillyp10.jpg\"><img style=\"margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/12\/supersillyp10-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"\" id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5004455589204345554\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Social stories<\/span> are often used to explain the intricacies of social interaction and other abstractions to autistic people. They look a lot like a comic book; rather than using complicated words and thus the inevitable abstractions, often beyond the autistic mind, they use pictures and sometimes text to explain a concept.<\/p>\n<p>A good example of a typical social story is the image to the left, developed to explain some simple similes for autistic children. Often, parents of autistic children will have ready-made images for various purposes, from brushing your teeth in the morning to welcoming guests to the house in a proper manner. Social stories can be an excellent, often invaluable, tool, and have saved the day for probably countless families with kids on the spectrum.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jkp.com\/\">Jessica Kingsley Publishers<\/a>, a company specializing in part on Asperger\/autism literature, publishes a sizable portion of the available books on autism spectrum disorders, so it came as no big surprise to me to find <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jkp.com\/catalogue\/book.php\/isbn\/9781843102229\">Revealing the Hidden Social Code<\/a> by Carol Gray prominently displayed. The book promises to explain &#8220;key elements of Social Stories<sup>TM<\/sup>, review the guidelines for writing them, and help writers to structure and develop their stories&#8221;, and indeed, it would have been one of the more authoritative guides on the topic since Carol Gray is the originator of the concept, had it not been for a little detail.<\/p>\n<p>TM.<\/p>\n<p>Everywhere, those two letters. T and M. And Social Stories, capitalized. Jessica Kingsley Publishers or Carol Gray, or both, regard the concept as trademarked, and so, everywhere where the two words <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Social<\/span> and <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Stories<\/span> are mentioned in each other&#8217;s immediate vicinity, the letters <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">T<\/span> and <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">M<\/span> follow, superscripted. Bla bla Social Stories<sup>TM<\/sup> bla bla bla bla Social Stories<sup>TM<\/sup> bla bla. Bla bla bla bla Social Stories<sup>TM<\/sup> bla bla bla Social Stories<sup>TM<\/sup> bla. Social Stories<sup>TM<\/sup> bla bla bla bla bla.<\/p>\n<p>See what I mean? Once you&#8217;ve noticed, it&#8217;s impossible to <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">not<\/span> see it. See how those two letters stand out, see how they destroy whatever context the author wished to dwell in? You can&#8217;t not see it.<\/p>\n<p>So, for me at least, it&#8217;s now impossible to buy that book because I&#8217;m afraid I&#8217;ll learn not about social stories as such, but about how important it is to preserve your questionable trademark, no matter the cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social stories are often used to explain the intricacies of social interaction and other abstractions to autistic people. They look a lot like a comic book; rather than using complicated words and thus the inevitable abstractions, often beyond the autistic mind, they use pictures and sometimes text to explain a concept. A good example of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[185,73,187,186],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}