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Presents a FREE Satellite Broadcast

Information and Materials for the Broadcast

Plain Language Satellite Announcement

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Sign in Sheet

Handouts/Exercises
(in PowerPoint- for text version click here)

Evaluation

Answers to Exercises 
(in PowerPoint - click here for text version)

Links to Other Plain Language Information

PLAIN LANGUAGE ACTION NETWORK (PLAN)--NPR Site
http://www.plainlanguage.gov/ 

Presidential Memorandum on Plain Language
http://www.plainlanguage.gov/cites/memo.htm

Below is an excerpt from an article by Joseph Kimble.  The whole article is available on NPR's Plain Language site, www.plainlanguage.gov.

1. U.S.: Judges and Lawyers -- Various Legal Documents ⁽²⁴⁾

In 1987, a colleague and I sent a survey to 300 Michigan judges and 500 lawyers. We received responses from 425. We asked readers simply to check off their preference for the A or B version of six different paragraphs from various legal documents. One version of each paragraph was in plain language and the other in traditional legal style. Neither the survey itself nor the cover letter referred to "legalese" or "plain English." Rather, the cover letter said the survey was part of an effort to "test language trends in the legal profession."

The same study was then repeated in three other states--Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. In Louisiana and Texas, only judges were surveyed. All told, 1,462 judges and lawyers returned the survey. And in all four states, they preferred the plain-language versions by margins running from 80% to 86%. A slam dunk.

Here is one of the six paragraphs, taken from jury instructions. ⁽²⁵⁾ (Of course, we didn't always put the plain-language version second.)

A [ ] One test that is helpful in determining whether or not a person was negligent is to ask and answer whether or not, if a person of ordinary prudence had been in the same situation and possessed of the same knowledge, he would have foreseen or anticipated that someone might have been injured by or as a result of his action or inaction. If such a result from certain conduct would be foreseeable by a person of ordinary prudence with like knowledge and in like situation, and if the conduct reasonably could be avoidable, then not to avoid it would be negligence.

B [ ] To decide whether the defendant was negligent, there is a test you can use. Consider how a reasonably careful person would have acted in the same situation. To find the defendant negligent, you would have to answer "yes" to the following two questions:

Would a reasonably careful person have realized in advance that someone might be injured by the defendant's conduct? Could a reasonably careful person have avoided behaving as defendant did?

If your answer to both of these questions is "yes," then the defendant was negligent. You can use the same test in deciding whether the plaintiff was negligent.

Notice that the B version uses shorter sentences; it addresses jurors as "you"; it avoids redundant pairs like foreseen or anticipated and by or as a result of; instead of the multiple conditions at the beginning of the last sentence in A (a so-called left-branching sentence), it uses a list at the end of a sentence; and it defines "negligence" positively. Version B is no shorter than version A, but plain language does not always mean the fewest possible words.

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