If ‘story’ is a somewhat rounded word, ‘narrative’ seems to suggest flow: one a ball of yarn the other a river. But the two terms describe essentially the same thing – the same thing, that is, in the sense that even if one cannot step into the same river twice, there is a sameness of river involved. Therefore the difference between story and narrative is not one of content but one of description. Which is to say, it has to do with what the speaker wants to convey in her naming of a piece of language that narrates a story. Grandmothers tell stories, literary critics investitagate narratives.
Something similar goes for the many names of writing. Much literary criticism has moved its object of study from literature to texts, while university departments of literature, forced to avertise the employability of their graduates, begin to educate writers rather than scholars of literature. The emphasis has shifted from learning methods of reading or gaining insights into the history of literature to becoming a competent user of words – a skill that is the more valued for being transferable into other, more profitable, professions. At the same time writing itself, in the professional marketplace, is often relabelled as content production. Neither a slowly unwinding string of yarn nor a meandering river of words, content is a filler that contributes to the balance of image, advertisement, and text on a webpage and is preferably presented in chunks short enought to travel well between computer, tablet and mobile displays.
But to return to the main thread of this narrative: a degree in language or literature can qualify you to produce content – often for digital media, which implies writing with an eye to how internet search engines generate search results. Unless a webpage can be easily googled, it is virtually non-existent and so there is a burgeoning need of search engine optimisation (SEO) analysts whose primary task is to optimise the relation between content and search ranking. This too a fit career for someone who has learnt the use of words. Thus, if one of the first lessons of literary study is the impossible distinction between form and content, producing content for an algorithm seems a fitting finishing stoke for such an education.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 