Legalese Vs "Plain English"
MIT brain science researchers took a look at comprehension of (and preference for) the use of legalese (legal language used in contracts and so on) vs. the same thoughts expressed in simple sentences. While lawyers did better at understanding their own dialect, nearly everyone, lawyer or not, preferred ordinary English. https://news.mit.edu/2023/new-study-lawyers-legalese-0529
Parsing legal language
Since at least the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon declared that federal regulations should be written in "layman's terms," efforts have been made to try to simplify legal documents. However, another study by Martinez, Mollica, and Gibson, not yet published, suggests that legal language has changed very little since that time.
The MIT team began studying the structure and comprehensibility of legal language several years ago, when Martinez, who became interested in the topic as a student at Harvard Law School, joined Gibson's lab as a research assistant and then a PhD student.
In a study published last year, Gibson, Martinez, and Mollica used a text analysis tool to compare legal documents to many other types of texts, including newspapers, movie scripts, and academic papers. Among the features identified as more common in legal documents, one stood out as making the texts harder to read: long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences.
Linguists have previously shown that this type of structure, known as center-embedding, makes text much more difficult to understand. When the MIT team tested people on their ability to understand and recall the meaning of a legal text, their performance improved significantly when center-embedded structures were replaced with more straightforward sentences, with terms defined separately.
More detail in TFA along with references to related work.
I've had to read my share of contracts and complex NDA/secrecy agreements, some of which were pretty sneaky, others very easy to follow. In my experience, the long sentence with strings of qualifiers in the middle is common, but once you know that is the structure it is possible to mentally assemble the start and end of the sentence and understand what's being said. Then add back in all the conditions where it applies, or does not apply.
I've been caught out a couple of times to my business and financial embarrassment. Once burned I've learned that, when there is a lot on the line, reading the fine print is often worth the effort. I've also learned that a contract presented to me isn't always cast in stone--reasoned objections are often negotiable and clauses can be struck or modified. While always an option, I resist hiring a lawyer, preferring to work through the language myself.
Full paper here, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2302672120 behind a paywall for me (perhaps the text is available elsewhere?)
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