The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen is written almost entirely in list form, almost as if the authors were adding some massively important rights to a piece of paper that already included a few items to pick up at the grocery store and a couple of chores that needed to be doing. ("Okay guys, first we need to swing by CVS to get Q-Tips, and then we need to fix France.")

But this structure is just because the authors believe that people have more than just one natural right. People, it turns out have multiple rights—all at the same time. Nobody's entirely sure just how many there are, but they can agree that the number of rights is large enough to just go ahead and make a list, rather than trying to cram them all into paragraphs.