In their "Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shaped Activity", Anna Sfard and Anna Prusak articulate the promise of story or narrative in defining identity as an analytic tool in sociocultural research on learning. The article strives toward a process-rich notion of identity that responds to prior sociocultural articulations of identity as an analytic construct. Theorizing identity as a relational and dynamic process, they propose narrative, or story, as a definition that can allow the term "identity" to serve as a "missing link" for understanding individual learning in sociocultural contexts. They propose to "equate identities with stories about persons", which the author shall refer to as the identity-as-narrative construct. Sharing Sfard and Prusak's goals for increasing narrative-minded research, this author aims to clarify the term "narrative", which is not defined in their article. Specifically, she elaborates on two central issues. Sfard and Prusak locate the identity-as-narrative construct within a sociocultural tradition. Because the term "sociocultural" has been widely and divergently used in educational research, this author clarifies this term in relation to the identity-as-narrative construct. She identifies two genealogies of sociocultural work on narrative. Situating the identity-as-narrative construct in the American sociolinguistic tradition affords a useful definition of narrative as a unit of discourse that is distinct from non-narrative discourse. This author also addresses identity-as-narrative construct from a methodological standpoint. By conceptualizing narrative-minded research work as a series of rhetorical processes and choices, this discussion untangles some of the complexities of narrative definition, identification, translation, and transcription. (Contains 16 notes.)