Legal documents often contain archaic terms, needless jargon, redundant terms, and high passive voice rates (“Legalese”). This makes documents more difficult to read, reduces efficiency, and increases the likelihood of confusion and disputes. To avoid these problems, the trend in law has been to favor plain English (or plain Language) over Legalese.
With ISO 24495-2: Plain Language Standards, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has provided a 4-factor framework for furthering these aims:
- Relevance—ensure information is appropriate and necessary for its audience, identify necessary related content;
- Findability—organize and present information so readers can navigate easily, use simple design and format techniques to highlight important content;
- Understandability—use words, structure, style, and design that makes messaging clear and consistent, define or explain concepts that are complex or confusing; and
- Usability—write so readers can use the information to act, evaluate readers’ use of the document after production
These standards provide principles and examples rather than measurable criteria. For instance, Principal 5.2.2 is “Use headings that convey meaning to the reader.” That’s nothing new. Many other resources available offer similar guidance. For instance, you can download the Security and Exchange Commission’s Plain English Handbook at:
While the ISO standards may prove useful and may add to the momentum of the plain English movement, if you want measurable data about a document, the easiest way to obtain that is to use the grammar function and Microsoft Word (or a similar program) to obtain information about the document such as:
- Number of words
- Number of paragraphs
- Number of sentences
- Sentences per paragraph
- Words per sentence
- Characters per word
- Flesch Reading Ease score
- Flesch-Kincaid grade level
- Passive sentence percentage
If you want me to review your document and offer suggestions to make it more readable, please contact me at plainenglishlawyer@gmail.com
