The researchers found that when they tested people on their ability to understand and recall the meaning of a legal text, their performance improved the most when center-embedded structures were replaced with more straightforward sentences, with terms defined separately. “In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘Total Payments.’ This includes the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof.” The paper offers this as a more understandable alternative, with the definition separated out: “In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company (all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the ‘Total Payments’), would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced.” In their paper, the researchers included this sentence, with a lengthy definition in parentheses, as an example: In this type of construction, a writer introduces the subject of a sentence, then inserts a definition of the subject, and then continues on with the sentence. The biggest culprit, they found, was center-embedding. When the researchers asked nonlawyers to read either legal documents or documents in which certain features of the text were altered without changing the meaning, they found that the passive voice and nonstandard capitalization did not make the documents more difficult to understand. Legal writing also features much more use of the passive voice, the researchers found. This is legally required in some types of legal documents to make certain provisions more conspicuous. As one example, they found that legal documents include many instances of nonstandard capitalization, such as using all caps. Using a text analysis tool that can identify patterns in large volumes of text, the researchers identified several features that occur much more commonly in legal documents than in other kinds of writing.
Consumption getting more conspicuous onstage movie#
First, they compared a large selection of legal contracts (totaling about 3.5 million words) to other types of writing, including movie scripts, newspaper articles, and academic papers. In their new study, Martinez, Mollica, and Gibson set out to figure out just why legal documents, such as terms of service agreements, mortgage documents, and other kinds of contracts, are so hard to understand. He cross-registered for an MIT linguistics class taught by Gibson, and after he finished his law degree, he joined Gibson’s lab as a grad student. While a student at Harvard Law School, Martinez became interested in how lawyers and judges use language to communicate. Frank Mollica, a former visiting researcher at MIT who is now a lecturer in computational cognitive science at the University of Edinburgh, is also an author of the paper. Martinez is the lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Cognition.
“Making legal language more straightforward would help people understand their rights and obligations better, and therefore be less susceptible to being unnecessarily punished or not being able to benefit from their entitled rights,” says Eric Martinez, a recent law school graduate and licensed attorney who is now a graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. The researchers hope that their findings will lead to greater awareness of this issue and stimulate efforts to make legal documents more accessible to the general public. “In this study, we're documenting in detail what the problem is.” It's borderline incomprehensible a lot of the time,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the new paper. “It’s not a secret that legal language is very hard to understand. While center-embedding had the most significant effect on comprehension difficulty, the MIT study found that the use of unnecessary jargon also contributes. Linguists have previously demonstrated that this type of structure, known as “center-embedding,” makes text much more difficult to understand. A new study from MIT cognitive scientists has determined just why these documents are often so impenetrable.Īfter analyzing thousands of legal contracts and comparing them to other types of texts, the researchers found that lawyers have a habit of frequently inserting long definitions in the middle of sentences. Legal documents, such as contracts or deeds, are notoriously difficult for nonlawyers to understand.
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