The Anatomy of a Formal Statement or Declaration
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A formal statement or declaration typically carries language asserting the truth of what follows, sometimes under penalty of a specific consequence for a false statement, which gives it a particular evidentiary weight that an ordinary letter or casual note simply does not carry in the same way.
That weight comes from the formal process behind it, not from the statement's content being automatically more accurate than any other kind of source, since a person can still misremember, exaggerate or genuinely believe something that later turns out to be mistaken, even within a sworn document.
Reading a declaration with this distinction in mind, respecting its formal weight while still applying ordinary scrutiny to its specific claims, keeps a writer from treating the document's solemn form as though it were a guarantee of its underlying accuracy, which no formal process, however solemn, can ever fully provide on behalf of an imperfect human witness.