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1 September, 2006
Eliminating legalese

Finally, I get a break from work! These last couple of weeks, I've been pulling a hefty amount of overtime to get segments of a project finished by their deadlines. One night I even worked until quarter past midnight!

You may be asking (in your head, of course), "But what are you doing Dave, that requires such long hours?" I was helping rewrite a City Council procedures by-law in plain language.

Don't worry, most people stare blankly when I tell them that I'm a plain-language writing consultant. I guess it's specialized work, although most companies, organizations, and governments need it.

We help people write so that the reader understands. No-brainer, right? Wrong. Did you read your mortgage? Your credit card agreement? Have you read a by-law or even a constitution? Not easy to understand, are they? But, contrary to popular assumption, the reason these documents are incomprehensible is not because they contain concepts the average reader can't grasp. No, the concepts are usually straightforward. So, why are so many important documents written in gobbledygook?

The reasons vary. Sometimes it's deliberate, to intimidate or confuse readers, or to hide things under heaping paragraphs of indecipherable code. Sometimes it's to make sure the writer's legal bases are all covered. Often it's tradition, an outdated norm perpetuating itself through a rampant fear of change. But the bottom line is that it's never both sensible and honorable to write things that the intended reader won't understand.

City Council meetings are very regimented affairs. Everything must happen in the correct order, and must be done by the correct people at the correct time. Nobody can speak out of turn, and when they do speak, a certain number of people must agree with them before what they said has any weight. The instructions for how all this goes down are the procedures by-law.

City Councils are governments, and serve their citizens. So why have a procedures by-law the average citizen can't read? In a nutshell, how can we obey laws we don't understand?

The by-law we were working on used terms such as in camera (not referring to a device that takes photographs) and transmittals (not sending your glove across time and space). The sentences were often so long that on the reaching the end, the reader would forget how they started. When there were descriptions, dangling modifiers left readers confused about was being described. And so on.

Our job was to change a really hard read into a not-so-hard read, while retaining the originals' precision and meaning. Difficult language is almost never necessary to express sophisticated concepts. I could tell you that the sole and singular requisite required by a self-cognizant being in order to be satisfactorily assured of the undeniability of its own true and irrefutable existence is the very self-cognizance which causes it to pose the question in the first place. Or I could quote a sophisticated thinker: "I think; therefore, I am."

Don't even get me started about corporatespeak, with all of its prior to, providing, go-forward basis, responsible for, and other such nonsense.

For many reasons, the world is full of writing that's needlessly heavy with jumbled, empty, inflated words that confuse readers. It's our job, first, to calm people down and tell them it's okay to write like a human. Then we show them how.

In a future column I'll tell you about the wonderful world of legalese. Here's a preview: it's usually unnecessary, often no more precise than regular language, and even becoming a legal liability.

For now, ponder this: the word currently is almost always useless.

Enjoy!

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