The manipulability of perception and meaning apply not only to simple visual examples but also to scenes and events that are described with written words and oral testimony. The skills involved are story telling skills, primarily narrative as opposed to analytic. They are designed to move emotion and set the frame for reason. Lawyers use narrative argument :
 

1. at the beginning of a legal brief in stating the case,
2. in the opening statement at trial when the lawyer "states the facts" to the jury,
3. in judicial opinions when the judge states the facts, and
4. as the basis for an argument or analysis in a law school class.

Theorists of cognition differentiate between narrative and logical skills. According to Jerome Bruner (in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986)), the narrative and the logical represent two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience and constructing reality.

Bruner explains that each of these ways of knowing has operating principles of its own, and its own criteria of construction. They differ radically in their procedures for verification. Both good narrative and a well-formed logical argument can be used as means for convincing a listener. But they operate differently upon him. Logical argument verifies truth by appeal to formal and empirical proof. Narrative establishes verisimilitude. The term "then" functions differently in the logical proposition "if x, then y " and in the narrative recital "He lay in wait for his victim and then he killed him." One leads to a search for empirical truth, the other for believable and particular connections between two events.