Re: intelligibilty and clarity of texts and communications...

SabDor@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

i'm interested in the above, especially in contexts of legal documents,
consumer protection, standard contracts etc.
i'm looking for research, line of thought etc., that argues that complexity
of and un-intelligibilty of "legalities" is redundant and un-necessary, and
serves political and corporational goals (keep the masses ignorant
about their rights/obligations). other possible connections would be
from information theory etc.
i have an intuition that the the intelligibilty and clarity of texts
could/should be measured and quantified
i will be thankful for any comment, reference etc.
Sabari G

There's a vast literature on legal language. You might start by looking
for work by Roger Shuy (Georgetown) and Judith Levi (Northwestern).

The "ordinary language" movement is hugely misguided, because the
precise meanings of the terms used in legal documents have been
established through usage over (for English) more than 6 centuries; when
you translate them into easy-to-understand words, you lose much of that
tradition and risk unintended consequences when it comes time to
interpret the document years or decades down the road.

Note that looking for arguments to support a particular point of view is
not "research."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages