I've seen people talking about how combos "tell a story." What do they mean by this. Would learning this improve my spinning? And can I have some examples?

Music can tell a story, but penspinning combos? lawl.

Penspinning tells a story of a kid bored in school who decides to spin his pen rather than listen to the instructor.

Lol what? Combos telling a story?

Who have you heard this from? O_O.

it's not that it 'tells a story'. it has the flow of a story. there is a opening move, perhaps it starts slow, then a little build up to the climax, and eventually to a visually impressive finisher.

while this is one way to plan your combo, in which bonkura's World Tourney 2007 round one vid is a prime example, im sure there are many other ways to make your combo flow in this sense.

yea obviously it's not a real story, you don't have characters or whatever. but there is a way to build a combo so that it looks coherent.

when people say "you have skills, but no style", it usually means you don't know how to build combos, but you know all the hard tricks.

So people with style usually start with little tricks, building to some crazy flourishing climax and then going back to the little tricks again? Kind of like a song goes "Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge etc etc w/e."

not necessarily, you can start strong too (many songs start like that) and oyu don't have to repeat sequences like in a real song, it just needs to be coherent. Like you know what you're doing.

Ah, okay thanks guys, I think I get it now.

Go look at my battle against TLDScorp in Ladder. You'll find your 'story' there.

Start simple, end strong. Be creative. gg Also smoothness, flow, etc. and all that other stuff in there also help. Don't forget to post intelligently and make sure people like you, this way you'll win public votes.