A Case in Point
Recently I was asked to review and possibly edit a single page from a book about to be published on Amazon. Full disclosure—my brother is the author. A couple of editors were concerned about the clarity of the passage in the original; one even suggested dropping it and replacing it with a different, more understandable example. The changes I made were not dramatic, but made a huge difference to the author, because he could simply swap in the new text and not have to completely redo an example and an accompanying illustration. Here is the original text:
CONCRETE VS. ABSTRACT
Stick to concepts that are simple and concrete. This is vital when presenting to a diverse audience with varied backgrounds and worldviews.
In 2011, there was a famous lawsuit in which a supervisor convinced his company to discriminate against another employee. When the employee sued the company for discrimination, the company was found to be at fault, not the supervisor.
In his ruling, the Supreme Court justice used a fable from 1679 by La Fontaine to illustrate the dynamics of the case. In the fable, a monkey convinces a cat to pull roasting chestnuts from the fire. After the cat has done so, the monkey eats the chestnuts and leaves the cat with nothing but burned paws. In the legal context, the monkey is the supervisor orchestrating the discrimination, and the employer is the cat, whose paws are burned due to the supervisor’s actions.
There are any number of complex ways this judge could have attempted to illustrate the crux of the case. He chose a simple 334-year-old fable. And it worked perfectly
The three things I was after were 1) additional concreteness—I looked up and read the actual Supreme Court opinion. It turns out the concept of “cats paw” cases is well known in legal precedent. A footnote described the actual fable (including the note about it being originally one of Aesop’s fables). I used these details and the case name and the Justice’s name in order to make the account of its use as a story more concrete. 2) I went out of my way to adapt the language to a style that is more commonly used when making reference to Supreme Court cases. 3) I wrung out the logic of the “In his ruling” paragraph to make sure that the sequence of the story and the matching of court case to story was strictly logical and entirely unambiguous.
Here is the text as edited. You can decide for yourself if this was an improvement:
CONCRETE VS. ABSTRACT
Stick to concepts that are simple and concrete. This is vital when presenting to a diverse audience with varied backgrounds and worldviews.
There is a 2011 Supreme Court case, “Staub v. Proctor Hospital,” involving a supervisor who convinced his company to discriminate against another employee. When the employee sued the company for discrimination, the court found the company was at fault, not the supervisor.
In the majority opinion, Justice Scalia cited a fable conceived by Aesop and put into verse by La Fontaine in 1679 to illustrate the dynamics of the case. In the fable, a monkey convinces a cat to pull roasting chestnuts out of a fire. The monkey makes off with the chestnuts, leaving the cat with nothing but burned paws. In the court case, the supervisor orchestrating the discrimination is the monkey, and the employer is the cat, whose paws get burned as a result of the monkey’s influence.
There were any number of ways Justice Scalia could have illustrated the crux of the case. He chose a simple 334-year-old fable. And it worked perfectly.