This slide show was prepared for my presentation at the 2013 Biennial Applied Legal Storytelling Conference, held in London, UK, at City Law School.

-I'd like to thank two brilliant people who are here at this conference whose work I've used and will be referencing today-- giants who shoulders im standing upon

Kenneth Chestek
Cathren Koehlert-Page

This research was initiated while I was a Masters student in Composition at The University of Akron and working in that university's School of Law (2011-2013).


For the last two years, while I was doing my masters program in composition, I worked as a tutor in the law school at the University of Akron, in Akron Ohio. While there, I became fascinated by the plain language movement in legal writing, and the grammatical consequences, so to speak. While doing that research, I noticed articles about fiction writing techniques in legal writing. So the next semester, when I took a class about literary linguistics, and my students were learning how to write appellate briefs, it was a bit of a perfect storm, linguistically speaking.

The purpose of the class was "to gain an understanding of the use of language for subjective purposes--such as engaging a reader and creating a point of view, a sense of consciousness, voice, and emotion--and to study linguistic tools for analyzing subjectivity in language."

So here I was, learning how excellent fiction writers grammatically draw their readers into a character's consciousness, and I realized that these same tools could be used in nonfiction storytelling in the same way. And by choosing to present a story subjectively, a legal writer could effectively engage a reader in a certain POV. And this could be an effective way to demonstrate the principles to students.

-- effective statement of facts presents compelling story

--capture attention, hold audience

--telling story from a pov, usually your clients, can creat also empathy in the reader

--here we can acknowledge this a given, and get on to the HOW

--and that teaching it becomes the sticky point, to students who are already struggling to learn a new language and way of thinking

--but principles from literary linguistics can be used to connect sentence-level grammatical structures to the creation of a POV, which can help students who may be struggling

--this definition is from Cathren koehlert-Page's article, "Come a little closer so i can see you my pretty..."

--the idea that good writers are able to manipulate the emapthy of readers by effectively portraying a particular pov

--by telling a story from the "right" pov, writers draw in readers, to help them experience the story from a clients perspective

--the rub of course is that it is relatively easy to see the difference when they are pointed out...

--as in these examples from Cathren's article show

-- it's easy to "feel" the layers of empathy that these sentences convey

--it is notoriously difficult, though, to create and maintain, as she also shows with some not-so-effective passages

--so how do we help our students recognize and craft the kind of writing that can move their readers beyond understanding into empathy?

So I took the relevant theorists and their linguistic principles and overlaid them onto Kenneth Chestek's sample brief from his article, "The plot Thickens: Appellate Brief as Story" because it was written with the express idea of a brief as a story.

I was very excited when this overlay worked well, especially thinking about the fact that while he wrote it with the idea of pov in mind, he probably didnt think about the sentence-level grammatical breakdowns that i was finding.

so what I'd like to show you today is a short introduction ot the linguistic theories i used and what I found when I applied them to the Statement of Facts in Chestek's brief.

--story outline--

First off, let's talk about states of mind. Looking at the earlier examples, as they get "closer," they get more heavily involved in the state of mind of the character.

Sige-Yuki Kuroda talks about the particular linguistic qualities of narrative In his article, “Where Epistemology, Style, and Grammar Meet: A Case Study from Japanese,”

He makes a distinction between reportive and nonreportive language: between "communicating" and "storytelling".

He used his native Japanese, where it is grammatically impossible to use convey states of mind in the non-first-person while using reportage (communicative) language. It is only possible to do so in a storytelling context.

English does not make this distinction grammatically; we often find that the constructs are quite implicit—that we recognize their effects without noticing their form. And this is where linguistics can come in handy.

Here, from the brief, are just two examples of the same idea. These are not reports of anything that the narrator (or anyone else outside of Margaret and Francie) can know without any doubt—they are the expressions of the state of mind of Margaret and Francie.

there is no way for an outsider to know how Margaret and Francie devoted or happy were. These are states of mind that are related experientially, helping the reader feel the depth of the couple’s emotion by putting the reader into the POV of the couple.

Susumo Kuno, in his book, "Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy" (1987), wrote that the role of a writer is like that of a movie director, deciding which is the best perspective from which to tell the story. Where writers place their “cameras” influence where the reader’s empathy will most likely lie.


He outlines various principles that linguistically create a specific PoV, the angle from which the most empathy is obtained. Three of them are particularly relevant to our example brief.

FIRST
The writer gives “syntactic prominence” to the person that he wants the reader to empathize with.

Linguistically, empathy resides with the grammatical subject of the sentence.

Out of the 28 sentences in the Statement of Facts in our example brief, half (14) have Margaret, Francie, or both of them as the grammatical subject of the sentence.

And even when they are not the grammatical subject, they are the topic, or the focus, of the other sentences.

In a construction where there is a possession ('s), empathy resides with the possessor-- not the possessed.

For example,
The use of Margaret as the descriptor of the relationship (the “possessor”)--even though the subject of the sentence is FRANCIE’s mother--gives *extra* emphasis to her as the empathy subject (client).

Even though it may seem to make more sense in some way to refer to her from her daughter's point of view, that would disrupt the careful crafting of the story from Margaret's pov.

--Kuno argues that readers will empathisize with the referent of the left-handed NP (in english) in a coordinate structure"

While these show Margaret and Francie as the topics of empathy, in fact Margaret is the true focus.
This rule shows that empathy resides with the “first” (left-most, in English) subject in plural constructions, of which Margaret is, in every case.

This is a good example of how most writers write this way unconsciously, doing what "feels" or "sounds" right, but that there are in fact lingerie principles underlying those decisions.

Paragrammar

--Arthur Palacas

Shifts the footing between the narrator (writer) telling the story and then commenting on the story.

Interruptive quality highlights the narrative quality of the rest of the sentence.

Linguistic principles can demonstrate more concretely the ideas that everyone here have been putting forth regarding the effectiveness of storytelling techniques.

By showing the syntactic underpinnings of evoking an effective POV, we can give students something to grab onto when they are trying to think about these concepts in their own writing.