Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

A contract is like a trick. You can clearly read every word written by the drafter, but the pile of sentences connected in the end will still make you fall into the abyss of confusion.

Why are the contract terms and documents, everything that is related to the provisions of the law, so difficult to read? This year's Ig Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to researchers who tried their best to understand the contract, and they discovered the mystery.

The journal cognition, which published this study, is a very good journal, so even experts, as long as they are not experts in the legal field, are probably very annoyed with contract documents. (legal experts do not rule out the possibility that legal experts also dislike it. Ha. "∠) _

After analyzing the English corpus containing 10 million words, the researchers found that the "problems" of legal contracts are: excessive use of clauses, excessive use of passive voice, improper use of capitals (not in Chinese). And improper use of words (this is a lot of Chinese) and so on.

Use too many clauses, sentences are difficult to read

The complexity of a sentence can be measured by how many components it embedding, just like the sentence "I know you know I know" can be infinitely nested, and it is not easy to really understand the meaning of multi-layer nested sentences.

In legal documents, there are many examples of poor writing, long clauses / attributives, and even deliberately making it difficult for readers to make multiple layers of nesting, such as the following paragraph:

If you use the dispute mediation service of Taobao platform in accordance with the rules of Taobao platform, it means that you recognize and are willing to perform the mediation decision made by the customer service or public reviewer (prescription transfer) of Taobao platform as an independent third party based on the disputed facts they know and in accordance with the rules of Taobao platform (including adjusting the transaction status of relevant orders, deciding to pay all or part of the disputed money to one or both parties of the transaction, etc.)

The simplified version is: "if you use the mediation service in accordance with the rules, it means that you agree and are willing to implement the mediation decision." in fact, it is not difficult to understand that the difficulty of understanding the original sentence lies entirely in that large number of attachment conditions.

In the first five first lessons for editors, one must be multi-use short sentences, such as the above sentence, which can be written as follows:

According to the rules of this platform, if you use the dispute mediation service of this platform, you recognize and are willing to perform the mediation decision made by the prescription. Prescription transfer includes customer service or public reviewers, who will act as independent third parties to make mediation decisions based on the disputed facts they know, including, but not limited to, adjusting the transaction status of the relevant order and determining the payment of all or part of the disputed payment to one or both parties of the transaction.

Legal logic still has to discuss with lawyer friends whether it is appropriate or not, but if we work hard in this direction, the contract should be easy to read _ (: lawyer "∠) _

Too many passive voices lead to stiff sentences

According to the statistics of the researchers, the passive voice sentences that use "by" in English legal documents account for 14.1%, while the proportion in standard English is only 2.3%, which is almost 6 times.

As for the percentage of passive voice sentences in different articles, the green bar is a legal document, followed by papers, blogs, novels, magazines, newspapers, speeches, TV movies, websites and the Washington Post.

Stephen Pinker, a master of linguistics, lists a section in his book "the sense of style" that the misuse of the passive voice can make the article much worse.

The passive voice can be ubiquitous in all kinds of languages. one of the most important reasons is that people naturally pay more attention to the object referred to by the subject of the sentence, so if people need to pay attention to someone who is doing something, the passive voice must be used.

But the voice should not be misused. If you don't think from the reader's point of view, the misuse of voice will cause the reader's attention to be pulled back and forth by sentences and confuse the reader.

For example, "see that lady with a shopping bag? a clown is being beaten with zucchini." It's counterintuitive, because what people expect is "did you see the lady with the shopping bag? she's hitting a clown with zucchini."

Unfortunately, most of the passive voice in legal documents is not used for special writing purposes. To be exact, the person who wrote it thinks nothing but saves trouble: "the author knows the end of the story." describe the result directly (something has been done). " [2]

The good news is that there are not many sentences that directly use "Bei" in Chinese contracts, and the bad news is that absent-mindedness is also common, which is reflected in the abuse of "progress".

The word "carry on" is easy to use, because it does not need to consider the position of subject, predicate and object, and it does not have to choose different structures according to different verb collocations. Different phrases use "A to carry B" to generate a sentence that can still be seen. Just like thickening with seasoning, you don't have to consider the characteristics of the ingredients and seasonings or the heat, just thicken it with an omnipotent method and it's over.

However, if you are fed up with too much thickening, too much use of "carry on" will also make the sentence lose its flavor. "either party fails to disclose information to the other party in accordance with this contract" is on a par with the passive voice in negative writing. far from "either party fails to disclose information to the other party in accordance with this contract" reads smoothly.

The improper use of words has made the reader illiterate.

Legal documents are the worst-hit areas of rare words. after all, many words are born for the contract. Without the contract, they are fish without water, and they can't live for more than three seconds in the air full of common words.

In the literature, there are two kinds of inappropriate words, one is to use words that rarely appear in daily life, and the other is to use words that are easier to understand but have to use terms.

The former refers to some mouthful legal terms, such as "full capacity for civil conduct", "means of relief", "legal subject" and so on, which are highly abstract and difficult to replace, while the latter refers to the synonyms of "registration of transfer of house ownership" and "transfer of ownership". The first word looks more professional than the second word.

Professionalism is the cornerstone of the legal profession, and language is the wall that protects it-no, not just lawyers, but most professions need to use terminology to maintain their own cost of food.

However, the strong wall may be able to drop a little bit. After unnecessary professionalism has been erased, the law is still important and lawyers are still important.

It is hoped that one day, "if the buyer breaches the contract and the seller initiates the collection procedure through a lawyer, the buyer will pay the legal fee", which is deliberately incomprehensible. "if the buyer's payment is delayed, the seller can: 1. Hire a lawyer to collect the money. 2. Ask the buyer to pay legal fees" such a concise and clear sentence!

Referenc

[1] Mart í nez, E., Mollica, F., & Gibson, E. (2022). Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language. Cognition, 224, 105070.

Stephen Pinker (2018). "sense of style: a Guide to Writing in the 21st Century." Beijing: machinery Industry Press

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fruit Shell (ID:Guokr42), author: Su Qi Editor: you Shiyou

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