tell them it…

This is a hard one, because of the necessity of having a strong vocabulary. I have found that the more words you know the meaning of, the better you are able to detect the nuances between one phrase and one similar to it. The overall meaning of a question changes depending on the words used, so, a person’s understanding is limited only by the extent of the words they know. Encourage them to expand their vocabulary, and a fun way to help them use what they’ve learned is to have them do mock “court cases”. Let someone be a judge (preferably yourself), have your attorneys, and give them an issue to debate. Keep it simple, modify it as you see fit, but steer them towards knowing that how they word their statements and questions will affect how the judge will render his/her decision. They’ll want to win (everybody does), so they’ll try to use what you’re teaching them in order to win. Hope this helps!

One way of telling them is by presenting a question in different ways to show that a question could be asked in so many ways, and similarly answers to a given question can vary too. It is like saying, no two human beings are identical physically and mentally!

I hope you get an answer from some lawyer who does depositions… They would know for sure.

Here are some expamples that come to mind:

“Is it raining?” (Yes or no question)

“Do you think its raining?” (Is the question about the rain, or about what the other person is thinking?)

“Will it rain tomorrow?” (calls for speculation)

“Did it rain yesterday?” (Depends on where one is located during yesterday.)

etc.