Quotations
Legal Statements. . .
Professor Joseph Kimble, Answering the Critics of Plain Language.
The lawyer's greatest weapon is clarity, and its whetstone is succinctness. Judge E. Barrett Prettyman
Carl Felsenfeld and Alan Siegel
[Plain language] is, or should be, every bit as accurate and precise as traditional legal writing. It is clearer — considerably clearer. It is usually shorter and faster. It is strongly preferred by readers. It would greatly improve the image of lawyers.
The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing (1994-1995)
Courts have traditionally looked with suspicion at dense boilerplate in which traps for the unwary are buried in fine print. Now design is beginning to take its place alongside consideration as a principle of contract law.
Writing Contracts in Plain English
| What's wrong with gobbledygook? We can't put it any better than a nurse who wrote about a baffling memo. She said that "receiving information in this form makes us feel hoodwinked, inferior, definitely frustrated and angry, and it causes a divide between us and the writer." |
| Plain Language Campaign website |
| During the First World War, Sir Roger Casement was charged with treason. But the question was: Did the law apply to acts of treason performed abroad? The answer depended on whether there was a pair of commas in the relevant section. The Act was so old that this was not clear, but the judges went down to the Public Record Office and looked up the old parchment Statute rolls, where they found markings that they interpreted as punctuation. As a result Sir Roger Casement was almost literally "hanged by a comma". The moral of the story is: do not neglect punctuation. |
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Dr. Michael Arnheim |
| We want to reverse the extraordinarily strange situation that free societies have arrived at where their members enter binding obligations they do not understand and are governed from cradle to grave by texts they often cannot comprehend. |
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David Elliott, modifying a comment by F. Bennion |
Wordsmith Associates provided invaluable plain language assistance and advice to my department through a review of key materials for a new alternative dispute resolution process that was launched in November 2003. Working under extremely tight deadlines, Wordsmith was able to transform drafts of a highly legalistic 40-page application form and 60-page guide into a plain text that could be understood by our staff and stakeholders. Wordsmith converted much of the text for a wide range of reading levels, without affecting the policy and legal intentions of the documents. Aside from the significant plain language work done on the content, Wordsmith dramatically improve (sic) the visual presentation of the documents. We now turn to Wordsmith for ongoing plain language advice for much of our public materials. ...as part of a proposal response to a RFP to an Ontario electricity operator |
| The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it. |
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Learned Hand |
| It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?". |
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A.A. Milne |
| Writing is not only alive and well in the business world, but writing whose style reflects flair, eloquence and a confident sense of self can springboard employees forward in their careers... Let me be clear. There is as much poor writing in business as in schools. Writing for teacher-as-examiner is replaced by writing for boss-as-examiner, often a boss who habitually plugs in the hackneyed business/legalese phrases we expect: pursuant to, enclosed please find, with respect to and the aforementioned. Business writing is often characterized by density, circuitousness, voicelessness, overuse of passive voice and non-standard English, punctuation and spelling. |
| Christine Mowat |
