Using Legalese Can Make Your Readers Think You’re Less Intelligent
You know at heart that plain English is clearer than legalese, but you still sprinkle your appellate brief with a heretofore this or aforementioned that. You know, for good measure, to impress your readers with your legal smarts, right? Wrong. Really, really wrong.
Your legal writing professor wasn’t making stuff up when she told you to steer clear of legalese in your writing. Ends up, there’s science to back up her advice.
In a study published in 2006 in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, researchers asked students to read texts of varying complexity. All of the texts conveyed the same information, but some texts were written in simple language while others were written with complex vocabulary.
Across the board, the readers judged the authors of the needlessly complex texts to be less intelligent than the authors of the simple texts. The results of the study suggest that this is due to “processing fluency,” meaning that simpler texts are easier for readers to process, which leaves readers with positive reactions to the text, including a sense of the intelligence of the author.
The study is ironically called Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly. It is by Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and can be found at 20 Applied Cognitive Psychology 139 (2006).
If you’d like to work on writing legal texts in plain English, here are a few books to check out –
