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Comment on MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

Yeah, when corporate and lobbyist lawyers are passing around a doc, obviously the easiest method is to simply insert their own provisions. They’re not paid to understand, rephrase and simplify the text. They’re paid to make it as complex and obtuse as possible.

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667@lemmy.radio ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to write stories about those crimes.

To test the copy and edit hypothesis, half of the participants were asked to add additional information after they wrote their initial law or story. The researchers found that all of the subjects wrote laws with center-embedded clauses, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to write a draft and then add to it later. And, when they wrote stories related to those laws, they wrote in much plainer English, regardless of whether they had to add information later.

Emphasis mine. That’s not to say what you’ve mentioned doesn’t happen, but even non-lawyers wind up writing this way. The article is interesting and worth reading.

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