Passage A Readers, like writers, need to search for answers.
Topic
How history is taught and written (Passage A) and how legal writing is taught (Passage B) — both critiqued for missing narrative.
Framework
Dual Passage. Both authors critique the dominant style in their fields and recognize a movement toward narrative — though they differ on how concrete their criticism is.
Main Point
Both authors critique their fields for stripping out narrative — Passage A in academic history, Passage B in legal writing. Both note movements toward narrative but doubt those movements will produce real change.
Passage A: Academic history is killing the joy of history
Readers and writers need to search for answers; academic historians leave nothing to the imagination. The author saw the perniciousness of the historiographic approach when teaching. Historians require students to read scholarly monographs that "sap the vitality of history." They assign books with formulaic arguments that turn history into abstract debate "unfathomable to those who lived in the past." Such books can't stimulate students who want to connect emotionally as well as intellectually.
Some historians have begun rediscovering stories — even fashionably so. The American Historical Association made "Practices of Historical Narrative" its annual theme. But it was still historiography, just with "narrative" in the titles. At meetings, very few historians actually tell stories or move audiences emotionally.
Passage B: Legal education trains lawyers to strip out story
Writing is at the heart of the lawyer's craft, so law teachers train aspiring lawyers in how lawyers write. Legal writing is necessarily ruled by linear logic — no diversions, surprises, or reversals. Conformity is virtue, creativity suspect, humor forbidden, voice mute.
Lawyers write as they see other lawyers write — and often write badly. The currently fashionable call for narrative might affect this. Every case has a story at heart — real events, people, conflicts, feelings. But legal analysis strips the human narrative content, and law students learn to act as if there is no such story.
The narrative-attention movement may put its terminology into the curriculum without producing real changes in how legal writing is taught or done. Still, awareness of narrative's value could serve as an important corrective.