Objection: No One Can Understand What You’re Saying

upstart writes:

Objection: No one can understand what you're saying: Study identifies ways that lawyers could make their written documents easier for the average person to read:

After analyzing thousands of legal contracts and comparing them to other types of texts, the researchers found that lawyers have a habit of frequently inserting long definitions in the middle of sentences. Linguists have previously demonstrated that this type of structure, known as "center-embedding," makes text much more difficult to understand.

While center-embedding had the most significant effect on comprehension difficulty, the MIT study found that the use of unnecessary jargon also contributes.

"It's not a secret that legal language is very hard to understand. It's borderline incomprehensible a lot of the time," says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the new paper. "In this study, we're documenting in detail what the problem is."

The researchers hope that their findings will lead to greater awareness of this issue and stimulate efforts to make legal documents more accessible to the general public.

"Making legal language more straightforward would help people understand their rights and obligations better, and therefore be less susceptible to being unnecessarily punished or not being able to benefit from their entitled rights," says Eric Martinez, a recent law school graduate and licensed attorney who is now a graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.

Journal Reference:
Eric Martinez, Francis Mollica, Edward Gibson. Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language. Cognition, 2022; 224: 105070 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105070

Original Submission

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