01
These are two different claims
"He said he would make sure I never worked in this town again" is a claim about specific words.
"He threatened my career" is a claim about what happened.
They feel like the same sentence with different wording. They are not. The first can be checked against a text message, a recording, another person in the room. The second cannot be checked against anything, because it is your interpretation of something.
Both are legitimate. The problem starts when a reader cannot tell which one you are making.
02
When to quote
Quote when you are confident of the actual words, and quote short.
A quoted phrase of six words that you are certain about is worth more than a quoted paragraph you have reconstructed. Readers trust short quotes. A long verbatim passage of a conversation from three months ago invites the question of how anybody remembered all that — and once they are asking that, they are not reading your record, they are auditing it.
So:
- —Put the words in quotation marks.
- —Keep them short.
- —Say where they came from: a text, an email, a note you made the same day, your memory.
- —If you are nearly sure but not certain, say so: words to the effect of "…". That phrase is doing honest work and professional readers recognize it.
03
When to describe
Describe when you remember what happened but not what was said.
A description still has to be specific. The failure mode is describing with adjectives instead of facts.
- —Not "he was aggressive" but "he raised his voice, stood up and did not let me finish."
- —Not "she was dismissive" but "she did not answer the question and moved on to the next item."
- —Not "they refused" but "they did not respond to the request, and the work started the next day anyway."
Each of those second versions describes behavior somebody else in the room would also have seen. The first versions describe your conclusion about the behavior, which nobody can corroborate.
04
Never blend them
This is the one that does real damage.
A sentence like: He said he'd "sort it out" and basically told me to stop making a fuss.
Half of that is a quote and half of it is a characterization, and the quotation marks lend their credibility to the whole sentence. A careful reader notices. Once they have noticed one of these, they start reading every other line looking for it.
Split it: He said he would "sort it out." He then said something I took as telling me to drop it; I don't remember his exact words.
Longer, duller, and worth far more.
05
Your conclusions still belong somewhere
None of this means you have no view. It means your view lives in a different place from the facts.
Keep the chronology and the point-by-point answer clean — quotes and descriptions only. Then put what you make of it in your own statement, at the end, where it is clearly labeled as your account.
A reader who can see the separation will often arrive at your conclusion by themselves, which is considerably more useful than being told it. What makes a record believable
06
Practical notes
- —Write it the same day. Exact words have a half-life of about a day. After that you remember the gist and begin, honestly and unconsciously, to sharpen it. How to write down a phone call
- —Quote the whole relevant bit. Cutting a quote at the point where it stops helping you is the kind of thing that gets found.
- —Keep the original wherever one exists. If it was a message, the message is better than your quote of it.
- —Don't clean up their grammar. If they wrote "your in breach," quote it as written, with [sic] if you like, and move on.
- —Don't quote yourself more generously than you quote them. Readers notice when one side of a conversation is suspiciously articulate.
07
Questions people ask
I remember the meaning exactly but not the words.
Then describe it, and say that is what you are doing. "The substance of what he said was that…" is honest and usable.
Can I quote from a recording I made?
If you have a recording, quote from it and say so. Whether you could lawfully make it is a separate question that differs from state to state, and worth checking before you rely on it.
They're now denying they said it.
Then it is your account against theirs, and what decides it is everything around it — when you wrote it down, whether anything else is consistent with it, and whether your record has been accurate elsewhere.
Where this fits
The full method is in How to document a dispute.
How we write these
About this guide
This guide is written and reviewed by the BuildMyEvidence editorial team. It's about keeping a record, never about who's right or what anyone is owed. It doesn't name laws or deadlines, because those change from state to state. When something here changes, the reviewed date at the top changes with it.
Guide to quoting someone versus describing them · no statute cited · education on keeping a record, not legal advice.