Is This Going To Be On The Test? (Story Time For Litigators)
There was awhile there when I thought I didn't like history.
Like when someone was trying to teach me history and not doing a very good job of it.
History taught badly is a procession of events that I don't care about listed by dates that I cannot remember.
But actually, I love history.
I love it when I learn it myself or when it is taught well.
History taught well is a story--a buffet of characters that are related by their ideas and the times in which they lived.
It is drawing connections between Napoleon and Beethoven, connections between Degas and Debussy, between Churchill and Thatcher.
Which is why I'll delete dang near all the dates from your brief if given half a chance.
Let me explain.
No. It's too complicated. After the jump, let me sum up.
Those of you who are a certain age will certainly remember sitting in a movie theater in 1977, hearing the blast of an opening fanfare as words started to scroll across deep space. Everyone knows the words at the beginning of the Star Wars story:
On or about November 14, 1066 in or around Tatooine . . . .
No? Of course not. That's not how stories begin. Stories--really good stories--begin:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . . .
Or maybe:
It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegone, my home town, out there on the edge of the prairie . . . .
Or how about:
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Elmer Gantry was drunk.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
That's how stories begin. And although none of the trial lawyers believe me, there's not a date in the lot because the dates don't matter!
Depending upon the point you're trying to communicate, nobody cares if the action of the characters took place on the 12th or on the 13th. Only the relation between the time and place to the characters or the reader matters:
- Star Wars: In creating fantasy, the precise time and place are irrelevant; it is just wholly other, long ago and far, far away.
- Prairie Home Companion: It's always (and never) a quiet week in Lake Woebegone.
- Tale of Two Cities: Paris in the age of revolution is contradiction and tumult.
- The Old Man and the Sea: It doesn't matter what days the Old Man went fishing, just that the Old Man on the sea never relents.
- Elmer Gantry: Elmer Gantry is always drunk.
- Genesis: God was the original cause.
On the rare instance that dates are material, they are probably only material in their proximity to other events. For example, back to our poorly written tale of Little Miss Muffet. There, the lousy trial lawyer (i.e., me) wrote:
COMES NOW, Dr. Thomas Muffet (hereinafter "Muffet" or "APPELLANT") and by fourteen points of error does hereby challenge the judgment of the Family Court in terminating his parental rights viz. his adopted step-daughter, Patience Muffet (hereinafter, "the Child") for, inter alia, endangering the Child on or about June 7, 2010 by exposing the Child to a venomous spider where the child lodged in the APPELLANT'S home. APPELLANT would respectfully show:
[Extended and Scrupulously Accurate Chronology Omitted]
On November 4, 2011, APPELLANT adopted the Child and took her into his home.
No human being experiences events this way. The point of the story, legally and factually, is that Dr. Muffet was not Miss Muffet's parent and had no parental duty to protect her on the day the that spider sat down beside her. So just say it. Spell out the relationship:
"The State complains that Dr. Muffet, in his role as a parent, exposed Little Miss Muffet to a spider in his home in June, but this was almost five months before Dr. Muffet adopted Little Miss Muffet, five months before he assumed parental duties, and five months before he took her into his home.
We experience life in story. We learn by story. We see ourselves in story. We connect with one another through story. If you begin most of your sentences with dates, you're not telling a story. You're just copying and pasting your chronology. You're not connecting. You're teaching history without imagination. And your reader is desperately wondering:
Is this going to be on the test?
And if they're thinking that, you're not persuading.
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Really good post Kendall. I will be mindful of this in my next brief. Got to be careful not to omit all dates though, as you may be required to prove that a certain event took place on a particular date.
Thanks for the comment, Ruben. Very occasionally a precise date is material--but only very occasionally. Usually, all that matters is that something happened earlier or later in time, and by how much, like in the Miss Muffet example. Often, what I will do if the reader might wonder about the precise date or might think me more credible if I demonstrate control of the record, is to include a footnote sentence with the precise dates and the source of the information. This still allows the text to read like a narrative instead of like a litigator's binder.