Comparing legal, policy, and statute writing--from stone records of ancient Britain civil servants to opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court--this article demonstrates how weaving threads of textual language variation and change can innervate writing in the disciplines and history of the English language courses, particularly courses designated for general education. We describe and illustrate our use of rhetorical theory and linguistic analyses to develop our students' soft skills, i.e., ideals of liberal education, and their applied skills, i.e., professional competencies, which lead to better employability. Specifically, we use the paralogic rhetorical theories of Thomas Kent (1993; 1999) to demonstrate the opaque relationship between language and meaning aided by the use of linguistic analyses--register-specific lexical choices, discipline-dictated syntactic structures, occasionally morphological and phonetic variation, and the principles of language change. We present three lessons focused on the use of legal texts that build strong citizenry through increased understanding of writings that serve as social contracts and by which students learn and practice professional codes, employ new tools such as AI, and practice presenting and responding to different perspectives centered on difficult social problems through the ages (e.g., slavery, racial inequity). Aptly, we conclude with a call for joining these two approaches as a productive pedagogical and research collaboration as the world of texts and oral data could be better examined through such dual perspectives.