Masson, M. E. J., & Waldron, M. A. (1994). Comprehension of legal contracts by non-experts: Effectiveness of plain language redrafting. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 8(1), 67-85.

Masson, M.; Waldron, M.

1994

Masson, M. E. J., & Waldron, M. A. (1994). Comprehension of legal contracts by non-experts: Effectiveness of plain language redrafting. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 8(1), 67-85.

geen

The primary motivation behind the advocated use of plain language in legal documents is to increase comprehension among non-experts. We report empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of three kinds of simplification of standard legal contracts for increasing comprehension among naive readers. A set of legal contracts was redrafted in three stages to produce three modified versions. In the first stage we removed or replaced archaic and redundant terms; in the next stage simplified words and sentence structure were introduced; in the final stage legal terms were defined or replaced with simpler terms. Comprehension, as measured by paraphrasing and question-answering tasks, was reliably enhanced by the use of simplified words and sentence structure, but absolute levels of comprehension were still very low.

The results from the comprehension tasks used in this study demonstrate that simplifying drafting style increases comprehension. Accuracy between the original and the final versions of the documents improved significantly both in answering questions and in producing a paraphrase of a portion of text.

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