Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language

So Much for Plain Language: An Analysis of the Accessibility of United States Federal Laws Over Time

“…"non-plain English") were startlingly more prevalent in federal laws than each of our baseline texts, not just overall but for virtually every year between 1951 and 2009. In line with common intuition and plain-language advocates and consistent with recent findings regarding private legal documents (Martínez et al, 2022;Martinez, Mollica, Liu, Podrug, & Gibson, 2021), this suggests that public legal language deviates quite heavily from plain English, and has been and continues to be more difficult to understand than standard English.…”

“…This possibility is undercut by our results, which focused on features that are known to have simpler alternatives (e.g. "this law prohibits smoking in public areas" versus "smoking in public areas is prohibited by this law"), as well as previous findings that show comprehension of legal content with a simplified register (e.g., Masson & Waldron, 1994;Martínez et al, 2022). While it seems entirely plausible that certain legal jargon is inevitable, our results suggest that in many instances such jargon can be replaced with simpler alternatives that preserve meaning.…”

“…Words that are infrequently used in everyday speech cause comprehension difficulties for readers relative to higher-frequency synonyms (Marks, Doctorow, & Wittrock, 1974). Legal language is reportedly laden with low-frequency jargon, such as aforesaid, hereinafter, and to wit (Rayner, Ashby, Pollatsek, & Reichle, 2004), and recent work has shown the language in contracts to be lower-frequency than that of other genres of English (Martínez, Mollica, & Gibson, 2022). According to the official plain-language guidelines, government writing should avoid the use of such low-frequency "dry legalisms" and "jargon" (Plain Language Action Information Network, 2011).…”

“…In each corpus we computed the percentage of words that contained non-standard capitalization (specifically, those that were in ALL CAPS). Although the plain-language guidelines do not discourage the use of all-capitalization in government writing, evidence suggests that non-standard capitalization ("ALL WARRANTIES ARE HEREBY DISCLAIMED") is common in certain types of private legal documents (Martínez et al, 2022) and has shown to inhibit comprehension in older readers (Arbel & Toler, 2020), relative to standard capitalization. In our analysis we coded a word as being in "all-caps" by calculating the proportion of alphabetic word tokens that were marked by Stanza as being entirely in uppercase letters.…”

Ig Nobel prize 2022: it’s better to be lucky than smart, how heart rate reveals romantic feelings, and why ice cream works as cryotherapy

“…So why is legalese used? Lawyers may be accustomed to using it, they may use it to impress clients, they may not realise it is too complicated for the average reader—or they may emphasise the company’s priorities rather than the users 4…”