A Word, Please: Legalese is a thing, even when it doesn’t come from lawyers

Early in my career as a newspaper reporter, a colleague used the word “detritus” in an article. Our editor changed it to “trash.”

“That’s a 10-dollar word,” the editor said. “We use nickle and dime words here.”

I had never thought about plain language before. But over the years, the seeds planted by that one brief exchange grew into a deeper understanding of written communication — especially communication that aims to inform the public. When the writer is bent on sounding authoritative, smart, fancy, he’s shortchanging the reader. Highfalutin language makes the story about the author — “Look how smart I am” — when it’s supposed to serve the reader by making the information as accessible as possible.

Apparently, the entire legal profession begs to differ. Legal writing is famously inscrutable and inaccessible — especially fond of long parenthetical ideas shoved in the middle of sentences. And according to a recent study, their reader-unfriendly prose is contagious.

“Legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike,” write the authors of a study published this summer. In other words, nobody — not even lawyers themselves — can easily slog through their stuff. Yet they keep cranking out sentences like this gem I found online: “I am herewith returning the stipulation to dismiss in the above entitled matter; the same being duly executed by me.”

In my books and columns, I sometimes take badly written passages and show how they could have been better. No can do this time. You can’t streamline a passage if you don’t know what it says. Bravo, returner of the stipulation to dismiss. Bravo.

If non-lawyers can’t decipher stuff like this and even lawyers themselves find it hard to understand, why do they write like this?

Opinion

A Word, Please: It’s not easy on the experts when grammar rules fall out of favor

In the past it wasn’t considered healthy to eat fruit while lounging on a chaise longue. But times have changed, writes grammar expert June Casagrande.

Sept. 10, 2024

The researchers have a theory. I’ll get to that in a sec. In the meantime, a question: If you were a witch and wanted to curse a fellow witch, which magic spell would you prefer: “In 24 hours, your fate will be worse, ‘cause she who casts spells now is cursed” or “You’re cursed, honey. Deal with it.”

That rhyming makes a difference, right? Makes it more magicky . More officially witchy somehow.

Enter the “magic spell hypothesis” of legal writing. “Just as magic spells are written with a distinctive style that sets them apart from everyday language, the convoluted style of legal language appears to signal a special kind of authority,” the MIT News paraphrases the MIT researchers as saying.

Those researchers tested the hypothesis by asking 200 participants to write laws prohibiting crimes like drunk driving and burglary. Then they asked them to write stories about those crimes.

The laws they wrote contained unnecessarily long, labyrinthine sentences with lots of parenthetical explanations crammed in. The stories, however, were written simply, without the parenthetical information stuffing. The kicker: None of the participants were lawyers. They were laypeople who somehow got it in their heads that bloated, fussy sentences make you sound more authoritative.

But here’s where it gets funny. The researchers said that this problem barely exists outside the world of legal writing because people are naturally inclined to speak and write clearly. And here, verbatim, is how they said that: “These results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicating efficiently, and that convoluted structures may be inserted to effectively signal the authoritative nature of the law, at the cost of increased reading difficulty.”

Maybe someday we’ll live in a world with that “general tendency to communicate clearly.” But until then, we’ll all keep slogging through textual detritus.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at [email protected].