Stop calling your tests “stories.” Really.
They’re not “stories”. They’re tests. They don’t tuck you into bed with a glass of warm milk and a nice fairytale to dream about; they assert that certain things should happen and complain when they don’t, in a purely mechanical and precise way. We’re programming computers, machines of pure logic here, not reading to children. Let’s dispense with the pointless cutesy façade and focus precisely on the task at hand.
They don’t deliver what they promise, anyway. Frameworks like RSpec and Cucumber do not let you write tests in “plain English”. They let you write tests in a horrible chimeric programming language that adopts a superficial English-like veneer over top of what’s essentially a regular old unit testing framework.
It winds up giving you the benefits of neither English nor a well written testing API; your code simply becomes excessively verbose for the sake of a (highly fake and brittle) natural language veneer. You’re still highly restricted in what you can say, just like a regular old programming language. The set of Englishisms that you can use is so grossly restricted and precisely defined that you can’t think in anything remotely like English. You have to memorize a precise set of rigid, fixed English labels and use that and only that. You do get the verbosity of natural language, though, along with the restricted semantic domain of the API. You get the benefits of neither and the disadvantages of both.
Since you’re memorizing a highly restricted API anyway, skip the twee cruft and just use a short and precise API from the start, without the pseudo-natural language clutter.