A friend of mine recently wrote:

Realizing that TW has NDA's to honor, is there anyway you could paraphrase a few User Stories for me so I can see good examples of what they should have? I realize they need only be 2-3 sentences, but since I've no experience with them at all (other than use cases) I don't know what the ideal story should be like. As in, what level of detail are they, verbage wise. Does the customer actually write them on the cards themselves while the developer is nearby to answer any questions?

Below is my response, that I thought might be useful to those adopting Agile.

At ThoughtWorks we generally use a form such as:

As a script author
I would like to save the script language to the database
so that it can be executed and altered in the future.

The underlined words are the 'template'. I've briefly written in the past about why I'm not a huge fan of the template; however, we have had success with it.

At the end of the day a story is a placeholder for a conversation; therefore, use whatever template you can create that will encourage the conversation.