Comic Strip Conversations: Illustrated interactions that teach conversation skills to students with autism and related disorders: Improving social ... and other developmental disabilities

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Comic strip conversations use stick figures and symbols to represent social interactions and abstract aspects of conversation, and colour to represent the emotional content of a statement or message. Children can also recognize that, although people say one thing, they may think something quite different―another concept foreign to "concrete-thinking" children. Comic strip conversations use symbols to represent social interactions and abstract aspects of conversation, and colour to represent the emotional content of a statement or message (Gray, 1994). Comic strip conversations can help autistic people understand concepts that they find particularly difficult.

Comic strip conversations are a technique developed by Carol Gray to help people with autism develop greater social understanding. Use age-appropriate photographs, picture symbols or drawings with text to help people who have difficulty reading or for younger children. These deceptively simple comic strips can reveal as well as convey quite a lot of substantive information.Comic strip conversations can be used to plan for a situation in the future that may be causing anxiety or concern, for example an exam or a social event.

In a comic strip conversation, the autistic person takes the lead role, with parents, carers or teachers offering support and guidance. Figure 4 (below) shows some 'conversation colours' that could be used to represent a range of feelings and ideas. Guidelines on introducing and using social stories effectively, so that they produce the benefits you intend.

Think about ways to aid comprehension – would adding questions help, or replacing some text with blanks for the person to fill in? Comic strip conversations can also offer an insight into how an autistic person perceives a situation. Start with small talk (for example, talking about the weather) to get the person you are supporting familiar with drawing while talking and to mimic ordinary social interactions. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.