How New Zealand Consumers Respond to Plain English

Abstract

In recent years New Zealand has seen an increasing awareness of the need for and the benefits of providing readily understandable business and government documents. In this paper I report a psycholinguistic study testing the level of consumer comprehension of bank contracts and the effect of using plain English to rewrite them. The plain versions encouraged subjects to read the documents more carefully than they read the original versions, and the subjects understood the content and implications better when the contracts were written in plain English. The most effective means of enhancing comprehension was that which included both lexical and syntactic manipulation of text. Subjects said that they preferred the plain English versions of the contracts to the traditional versions.&dquo; ew experiences are as refreshing as finding a contract we can read,&dquo;Fsays Crow (1988, p. 86) in his article discussing consumer contracts, readability, and comprehension. Crow's statement will, in turn, be refreshing for many, who will find that they are not alone in feeling annoyed, confused, frustrated, and even intimidated or stupid when confronted with a document that they feel is beyond their comprehension.As citizens and consumers we encounter every day and in almost every sphere of activity documents that are less than readable, be they law and regulations, instructions, manuals, insurance policies, and so on. Criticism of writing that is difficult to understand is not new, and over the centuries there have been attempts to change the way official and other public documents are written so that they are understandable to those who must read them. As early as the sixteenth century, for example, an English judge ordered a hole cut through the centre of a particularly lengthy document filed in his court. He then ordered the writer, who puffed up the document from 16 pages to 120, to be led around, with the head stuffed through the hole, in front of all those attending court (Asprey, 1991;Wydick, 1985).More recent calls for readable documents can be seen in writings since the middle of this century by writers such as Rudolf Flesch (1949/1974), Sir Ernest Gowers (1954/1986), and Stuart Chase (1954/1971. Many law professors and practitioners have also advocated simpler legal language, including language used in contracts (e.g., Conard

“If It’s Easy to Read, It’s Easy to Claim”—The Effect of the Readability of Insurance Contracts on Consumer Expectations and Conflict Behaviour

“…Indeed, at first glance, there is much to be said in favour of the Bplain language movement.^Research, for instance, shows that plain language, consistent use of vocabulary, avoidance of overload and ambiguity, adaptation to the readership, and ease of document structure may impact on comprehension (Campbell 1999;Davis 1977;Garrisson et al 2012;Greene et al 2012;Kieras and Dechert 1985;Campbell 1999). Furthermore, the use of headers may aid recall and retrieval tasks (Hartley and Trueman 1983) and that adding connectors, logical structures, and coherence markers between sentences are beneficial to inexperienced readers (Kamalski et al 2006).…”

Er ’klart sprog’ lettere at forstå? En undersøgelse af forståelsen af to versioner af et brev fra SKAT

“…Det gaelder fx for Davis (1977), Walmsly et al (1981), Gunnarsson (1982), Swaney et al (1991), Masson og Waldron (1994), Campbell (1999, Dickinson et al (2001), Jansen og Steehouder (2001), Pedersen (2004), Jones et al (2012) og Demarmels et al (2013). 1 1 Her i artiklen fokuserer vi på undersøgelser af hvilken forskel forskellige tekstversioner gør for laesere.…”

“…(se Balling 2013: 3 for en komplet liste over de konstruktioner hun beskaeftiger sig med) eller brugen af pronomener og formuleringen af overskrifter som spørgsmål (Jones et al 2012), ikke har nogen større betydning for tekstforståelse -om nogen overhovedet. Det gaelder også i Campbell (1999), der på den ene side viser at tekster skrevet på "plain English" forbedrer forståelsen, men som på den anden side konkluderer at "linguistic and superficial design changes may not be enough to make the documents truly comprehensible" (1999: 354). Der er manipuleret ved flere af de ovennaevnte traek i omskrivningen fra den ene til den anden af de to brevversioner vi undersøger (se afsnittet Materialer i metodeafsnittet): De fleksiviske passiver (s-passiverne) er fjernet, nominaliseringer er gjort til saetninger, den gennemsnitlige saetningslaengde er kortere, og morfologisk komplekse og/eller sjaeldne ord er fjernet i den reviderede version.…”

Narrative: An approach to deciphering professional communication challenges in three professional venues

“…Several communication scholars have published articles on PL (Barnes, 2007;Byrne, 2008;Campbell, 1999;Kimbel, 2003;Mazur, 2000); however, these studies focus on clarifying PL, debunking PL myths, and countering opposition to the PL movement, but overlook the essential link between business communication pedagogy and PL.…”

“…Communication scholars also continue to support PL (Barnes, 2007;Byrne, 2008;Campbell, 1999;Kimbel, 2003;Mazur, 2000;Williams and James, 2009). Most recently,…”