7 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org Featured Article A narrative isn’t a recipe for how to make the same solution, it’s a conversation about the things you saw, considered and thought followed by a discussion of how those things influenced you. To this end, I believe a well-written narrative will include your justifications, ambiguities found, any considerations given to occupation, boundary law principles held, and other solutions considered but not selected. By these general topics I mean: • Justifications can include things like another found monument being used as confirmation of a long extension or not holding an original monument which nearly matches record because of a comment by a neighbor that he put the monument back after building the fence. • Ambiguities aren’t always as evident to the next surveyor—perhaps the deed makes a call to a fir tree, and you had to make a judgment regarding which fir tree but 20 years from now there may be no fir trees at all. • Occupational evidence can change or disappear over time. Old fences are often used as confirmation of a particular boundary solution, or even sometimes as a monument; however, if it’s gone and the next surveyor doesn’t know you used it as evidence, it will be hard for them to respect your solution. • Boundary law principles can include subjects like accretion/erosion, priority of calls or junior/senior rights. It can also include decisions made based on case law, such as if you choose between two possible solutions for a section corner based on the Dykes v. Arnold precedent. • Acknowledging other possible solutions and explaining why they were not selected makes your narrative more persuasive. Even if you’ve done a stellar job with all the points above, your boundary still runs the risk of being perceived as slap-dash if you don’t acknowledge possible alternatives. Another surveyor isn’t likely to have the same evidence as you and is guaranteed to not have the same thought process as you, with the result that they’re likely to question your work if they don’t understand why (there’s that word again) you didn’t select the solution which seems to them to be terrific. Also, how you write a narrative can be just as important as what you write. Use clear, concise and descriptive language with proper punctuation as opposed to run-on sentences. This article you’re reading now is easier to digest because it is broken into paragraphs, short sentences, and bullet points. Formatting like this helps you process the information in a more digestible way. Narratives are infinitely easier to understand if they’re broken into segments based on subject matter, preferably with a heading for each segment. Most of my narratives discuss each boundary of the property in a separate segment—“Northerly Boundary,” “1st Ave Right-of-Way.” For my more complicated boundaries though, I’ll add more sections to discuss background items—“Ambiguities in Vesting Deed,” “Conflicts Between Survey x and Survey y.” A well-written narrative head off the issues Justice Cooley was concerned about when he said, “If all the lines were now subject to correction on new surveys, the confusion of lines and titles that would follow would cause consternation in many communities. Indeed, the mischiefs that must follow would be simply incalculable, and the visitation of the surveyor might well be set down as a great public calamity.” If another surveyor can’t understand why you were right and you don’t offer an explanation, they can just as easily conclude that you made a mistake or overlooked something. If a question could potentially have multiple answers, that increases everyone’s liability, decreases the public’s faith in our profession and fails to meet the charge in OAR 820-020-0015(1) to hold paramount “the safety, health, property, and welfare of the public.” We all know how tough it can be to look back at someone else’s surveying work and puzzle to figure out why they did what they did, if there is no explanation provided. We can’t reach back in time and ask, and future surveyors won’t be able to reach back in time and ask us. So, to help them know why we made the choices we made, since none of us is psychic, include good narratives so that we can follow in each other’s footsteps. A narrative isn’t a recipe for how to make the same solution, it’s a conversation about the things you saw, considered and thought followed by a discussion of how those things influenced you.
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