Passage A Readers, like writers, need to search for answers. Part of the joy of reading is in being surprised, but academic historians leave little to the imagination. The perniciousness of the historiographic approach became fully evident to me when I started teaching. Historians require undergraduates to read scholarly monographs that sap such books cannot stimulate students who yearn to connect to history emotionally as well as intellectually.
In an effort to address this problem, some historians have begun to rediscover stories. It has even become something of a fad within the profession. This year, the American Historical Association chose as the theme for its annual conference some putative connection to storytelling: "Practices of Historical Narrative." Predictably, historians responded by we still encounter very few historians telling stories or moving audiences to smiles, chills, or tears.
Passage B Writing is at the heart of the lawyer's craft, and so, like it or not, we who teach the law inevitably teach aspiring lawyers how lawyers write. We do this in a few stand-alone courses and, to a greater extent, through the constraints that we impose on their writing throughout or reversals. Conformity is a virtue, creativity suspect, humor forbidden, and voice mute.
Lawyers write as they see other lawyers write, and, influenced by education, profession, economic constraints, and perceived self-interest, they too often write badly. Perhaps the currently fashionable call for attention to narrative in legal education could have an effect on this. It is not yet exactly clear what role narrative should play form of the case, law students learn to act as if there is no such story.
It may well turn out that some of the terminology and public rhetoric of this potentially subversive movement toward attention to narrative will find its way into the law curriculum, but without producing corresponding changes in how legal writing is actually taught or in how our future colleagues value of narrative could perhaps serve as an important corrective.
What this question is testing
Anticipate
This is a Method question with a NOT twist — find where the passages are not parallel. So I need to identify a real difference between them.
Passage A names concrete examples: scholarly monographs, the American Historical Association's 2-word annual theme, specific session titles ("Oral History and the Narrative of Class Identity," "Meaning and Time"). Passage B is more general — it critiques legal writing in broad terms without naming specific cases, assignments, or named legal-writing examples. So Passage A describes specific examples; Passage B doesn't.
Goal
Find the answer about specific examples appearing in A but not B. Common traps:
Answers that pretend only A presents and rejects opposing views — both engage the narrative movement
Answers that pretend only A makes evaluative claims — both do
Answers that pretend only B offers criticism — both do
Answers that pretend only B outlines a theory — neither really does
Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.