Why are contracts so confusing? Hint: It’s bad writing.

We’ve all stared at a legal contract, praying that the information will just osmose into your brain through your eyes. Sadly, that never happens.

Instead, we’re stuck trying to read and understand the dense text before us. We wade through, sentence by sentence, until eventually we just skim the rest and hope that’ll do.

I’m not a lawyer, you might think. I can’t understand this. I didn’t go to law school. It’s far too complicated for me.

But it’s not your fault.

It’s proven: Legal writing is just bad

One of two things could be happening when you don’t understand a contract. Either the subject is too technical for you, or the writing is bad.

So in July 2022, researchers looked for the answer. Their conclusion? It’s just poor writing. It’s not your knowledge or skill level. There are certain traits in legal writing that just make it incredibly difficult for anybody to understand.

Interestingly, you’ll notice these traits come up a lot in other dense texts, like complicated instruction manuals or technical white papers. But I digress.

What are the traits of bad writing?

First, the researchers analysed a huge amount of legal texts and looked at how often certain traits came up.

After they’d found the most common traits, they put together a few short snippets of text – one with the traits and one simple – and compared the results.

They looked at five main traits that were making the writing hard to read.

1. Capital letters. Trying to emphasise a point by writing a word or a sentence in all caps.
2. Archaic language. Using words that people just don’t use anymore. Words like “aforesaid” and “to wit.”
3. Legal jargon. Using legal or Latin phrases when there’s an everyday alternative.
4. Centre-embedding. This is where you jam a piece of information halfway through a sentence, rather than having a separate sentence.
5. Passive voice. This is where you put the subject of a sentence at the end, rather than at the beginning. So “this contract was written by our legal team” rather than “our legal team wrote this contract.”

Their experiment confirmed that all five of these made it more difficult to understand the contract.

The worst traits were centre-embedding and word choice

While all these traits make it harder to understand a piece of writing, the biggest culprit is centre-embedded clauses. Why? Because they work against our working memory.

If you come across a new piece of information in the middle of a sentence, you have to hold onto both bits at the same time. You don’t have time to process them.

Take this sentence:

We’re going to have a – at midday on Tuesday – meeting about our sustainability plan – including our newest initiative around recycling – and what you can do to help.

It’s hard to read. By the time you get to the end, you’ve forgotten the beginning. Each of those tangents should have been its own sentence.

Here's our rewrite: 

We’re going to have a meeting about our sustainability plan and what you can do to help. We’ll also cover our newest initiative around recycling. The meeting is at midday on Tuesday.

See how much easier it is to digest when we break the information into three separate points?

This is what happens in legal contracts, technical documentation, and corporate reports all the time.

Avoid these bad habits in your own writing

1. Stick to one idea a sentence. Split up long sentences and don’t cram multiple ideas into the middle of one.
2. Emphasise properly. Don’t capitalise sentences just because they’re important. It has the opposite effect.
3. Use everyday language. Avoid jargon and other obscure terms. It just gets in the way of people understanding you.
4. Use the active voice. Put the subject first, not last. It makes it much easier to follow.

If you do that, you’ll avoid making your writing sound like a contract. And make sure that everybody can understand you.

Do you have a communication problem?

If you have issues with persuading people, inspiring staff, or communicating clearly, we can help you out. Just get in touch, and we can help you fix the underlying problems.