Evans, Richard --- "The attitude problem" [1997] LawIJV 37; (1997) 71(2) The Law Institute Journal 21

• PROSE AND CONS - The attitude problem

PROSE AND CONS - The attitude problem

Martin Cutts was a co-founder of the Plain English Campaign in Britain in the late 1970s. He has been teaching plain language to all sorts of people ever since - and he has discovered that lawyers are rather different to every-one else.

"It sounds a bit strange, but lawyers generally have the mental equipment to deal with ideas about better writing," he told the Journal, speaking from London. "They have the ability to grasp fairly quickly the difference between passive and active, for example. This is something which I have to spend a lot of time hammering into other people, because they boggle at the idea of anything to do with grammar.

"What can be difficult is the problem lawyers have with their attitude to people. Many [lawyers] feel themselves to be terribly superior. They don't see why they should make their writing clear. They think they are already doing a very good job for which they are very well paid, and they don't seem to realise that most people just don't have the knowledge or the vocabulary to cope with the writing that lawyers produce.

"Even when lawyers are acting as advisers they are often in a superior posit-ion. They have access to great mysteries and they have a great store of knowledge that most of us don't have. They are advising from a position which they regard as one of intellectual superiority.

"So there is a serious attitude problem to overcome. But you can overcome it. More and more with some of these good London firms that I come into contact with - these are the commercial law firms with lots of overseas customers, many of whom are not keen on archaic legal language - you can make good progress in teaching language skills."

The secret, Cutts said, was in pitching the plain language message the right way. "Provided you can show them this is not trying to reduce everything to some lowest common denominator, provided you show them good techniques that they can use in their everyday work, then I think they can take the ideas into themselves and they can learn to write better."

He said British lawyers were becoming more willing to change the way they communicated, partly because economic changes were forcing a more competitive outlook.

"Change is coming, and coming fairly quickly. But there are something like 60,000 practising solicitors in this country, and attitudes do take a while to shift. Outside London in particular ideas about plain language are not well understood. Some people think it is just a matter of using short words instead of long ones.

"I was running a course last week for a firm of local authority lawyers, and many of them were still convinced that they were not allowed to have punctuation in legal documents. We looked at a few documents and I showed them that there was all sorts of punctuation in them, even in the traditionally drafted ones. It was a bit of a shock to people to find that even in documents they were seeing quite regularly, there was indeed punctuation if they looked carefully.

"That was an important first step on that course."

Cutts said that lawyers were often unnecessarily concerned about a small number of legal terms.

"They can keep legal terms of art - I don't see any problem with some of those - and once you have established that, they realise there is an awful lot you can do with the other 98 percent of the text. If you then start putting headings in and using your definitions better, then suddenly you begin to produce this amazingly clear document compared to what you had."

Many of Cutts' thoughts on clear communication are contained in his book The Plain English Guide, which Oxford University Press recently released in paper-back. The book is only 164 pages, but full of well presented, clearly articulated principles of plain writing which are illustrated with numerous examples taken from real documents. The book also covers the basics of good document design, tips on how to encourage plain language in your office, the use of illustrations and tables, how to plan a structure for your documents, and a great deal else. (It is also excellent value: only $10.95.)

The book is intended for those who have to write "essential information" such as business letters, reports, standard form documents, contracts and legislation. This information is often innately dull, the book says:

Your writing day could be occupied by matters so humdrum they would make a great novelist weep: the rent for a piece of waste land; inefficient plumbing in the office toilets; a small rise in the price of custard. [But] faced with a dull topic, there is great skill in creating a clear document that rises above the bland and the boring.

If this were achieved more widely and more often, Cutts said, we would all benefit.

"Having good documents means that people can minimise the time they have to spend reading dreary stuff, and get on with reading the newspapers, or poetry. Be-cause the time we spend reading forms from the department of health or letters from our lawyer - we don't get any pleasure from that. It is purely to keep body and soul together, to keep the roof over our heads. We all want to get on with the exciting things of life rather than fritter our' time away reading tenancy agreements." 

RICHARD EVANS