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
Topic
Two authors writing about the same problem in different fields: history and law have both stripped the storytelling out of their professional writing.
Framework
Dual Passage.
Main Point
The simpler version: both authors think their fields have lost narrative. Passage A's author is a historian who watched students get bored when forced to read dry historiographic monographs, and notes that the recent "narrative" fad in academic history is mostly cosmetic. Passage B's author teaches legal writing and observes that lawyers are trained to strip story out of every case — but acknowledges that paying attention to narrative might at least help.
Passage A: History
Academic history saps the vitality of history. The author calls out specific examples — required monographs, formulaic argument structures, conferences that paste "narrative" into titles without changing how historians actually write. Few historians actually move audiences.
Passage B: Legal writing
Legal writing has its own logic — linear, no surprises, conformity over creativity. Law students learn to ignore the human story behind every case. The narrative movement might bring some terminology into the curriculum without changing the practice — but awareness alone could help.
Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.