ABSTRACT
The phenomenological method consists of the ability, or rather the art of being sensitive, sensitive to the subtle undertones of language, to the way language speaks when it allows the things themselves to speak. A common rhetorical device in phenomenological writing is the use of anecdote or story. This chapter focuses on the human science research is a form of writing. It discusses a specific story form or narrative form: the anecdote. Anecdotes, in the sense that they occur in the phenomenological writings of, for example, Sartre, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty are not to be understood as mere illustrations to 'butter up' or 'make more easily digestible' a difficult or boring text. Anecdote can be understood as a methodological device in human science to make comprehensible some notion that easily eludes us. The object of human science research is essentially a linguistic project: to make some aspect of our lived world, of our lived experience, reflectively understandable and intelligible.
