For many years, consumer organisations, especially consumer organisations, have insisted on requiring legal documents to be drafted in “plain English”. The revolutionary concept behind this campaign is to enable ordinary people to understand legal documents. Diverse. Finally, a relatively new legalism, “so sure”, has crept into the legalese. This sentence serves little more than a misguided attempt to determine the accuracy of a description of a legal document. With this interpretation, the lawyers describe “this particular contract of sale dated January 1, 2001 between Smith and Jones.” While this term can be useful when comparing two separate agreements, it is typically used to describe a single document, often in the preliminary statement of an agreement. This phrase can easily be replaced by the more common terms “a”, “a” or “the”. Is there anything to be gained if the author uses “so secure” if the author describes the purchase contract in detail? It does not appear that “this particular contract of sale” is more descriptive than a “contract of sale” dated January 1, 2001 between Smith and Jones, but it adds a legal touch to the document. Running-in assemblies.
The most effective writing consists of short sentences that are easy to digest and understand. However, in many cases, legal documents attempt to cram several independent ideas into a single sentence. To do this, they often use the subjunctive: “provided that”. This popular phrase is an indicator in any legal document that warns the reader: “Run-on sentence ahead!” without thinking; speak like an uneducated person about a subject of which he knows nothing; provide an answer to a question that is not relevant to the question; Sean`s cousin, Bob, gave a confused answer (not a Dr. Bob hocus-poucus). Bob gave a mumbled answer to Sean`s simple question about a fishing trip. The intense whisper that some people make on a conference call when they start discussing something at one end without being aware that it cannot be heard – or understood – by participants on the other end. My tricky question stunned the unprepared team in the United States and they got into a whisper that made absolutely no sense to us for that purpose. Another form of repetition commonly used by lawyers is the use of verses, two words used together when a single word conveys the same message. Commonly used couplets are: “terms and conditions”, “good and valuable”, “commitments and agreements”, “free and clear”, “everyone and everyone” and “everything and all”.
While some of these couplets may be used in everyday language, they appear to be disproportionately used in legal documents. Stupid drive syndrome. This term refers to a practice used in a single field outside of legal writing, writing cheques. Here, the author assumes that a reader does not have enough intellect to understand, as if the document were talking about “30” days, the author is referring to “30” days and not to some other number of days. To help the reader, whenever the author refers to a number, the number is expressed in both Arabic words and letters. Therefore, one party must “notify the other thirty (30) days in advance” or there may be a “ten (10) day delay” before action can be taken. Lawyers do not limit this dualuse to lengthy legal documents; Cover letters often contain “two (2)” copies of an attachment. Outside the legal realm, authors attribute enough intelligence to the reader to understand a number when expressed in a single word or character or series of characters. Even more blatantly, many affidavits written by lawyers end with the words “more affiant says nothing” or, in some falsifications, “plus affiant says not.” Perhaps Shakespeare would be grateful that the language used in his time has not changed in 500 years, but where in modern literature would one find such a language and what does it add to a document that the period at the end of the penultimate sentence or otherwise last sentence does not do? If this sentence did not appear, would the reader continue reading even if there is no other content? The words “H”. These words “here”, “hereunder”, “in this regard” and “hereafter” are the cornerstones of legal drafting. Although these words, with the exception of “below”, are beyond precision because it is never clear whether they refer to a particular paragraph, section or the entire agreement, they are generally used as an abbreviation of “in this document”. Generally, the “summary” requires the addition of a separate definition section to clarify its meaning.
You won`t see these words in everyday language or even in non-fiction books, except perhaps the use of “in the afterlife,” which refers to an existence beyond the grave. These “h” words are foreign to everyday language and exist only in legal documents, perhaps as a tag to identify the document: “This is a legal document!” Here are some of the most common legalisms that make it difficult, if not impossible, for an ordinary English speaker to grasp the contents of a legal document under the layers of mud added by the author. It is doubtful whether a contemporary author will succeed in developing his career using the design techniques common in legal documents. Nevertheless, lawyers are contemporary authors; You are the author of legal documents. These documents do not become more effective by using archaic, repetitive or otherwise evil language that some call legal “hocus-pocus”. There should be a certain degree of pride in writing a clean, clear and readable document. Those who aspire to this goal may share the same sense of accomplishment in their craft as the authors of a recent work of readable non-fiction. Hocus-pocus or hocus-pocus is confusing or meaningless language.
The term is often used to express humorous criticism of middle management and jargon such as legal language that non-specialists find difficult to understand. For example: “I don`t understand all this legal mess in small print. But what is “plain English”? It can be difficult to articulate what “simple English” is, but it sounds like Potter Stewart`s characterization of pornography – “I know when I see it.” Perhaps the simplest way to characterize “simple English” is negative: it`s not your typical legal writing. Proponents of simple English try in one way to replace simple pronouns such as “I”, “I” and “you” for typical terms used in legal documents such as “seller” and “buyer”. In this regard, they may have gone too far to lower the bills. There are many more important domains before you have to replace nouns with pronouns. It may be noted that some progress may have been made, albeit at an icy pace, in virtually eliminating the identification of parties to an agreement as “part of part one” and “part of part two”. Lawyers may be offended that the product of their profession is not appreciated by the general public, but should they be offended if they write their documents in a language other than modern English? Why is it necessary for lawyers to use “legal language” to express themselves? Law may be inherently a conservative profession that continues to express many concepts as expressed centuries ago; For example, the distinction between law and justice.
But we have moved from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and is it necessary to cling to the traps of a bygone era? More importantly, bad English is an end in itself. In his preface to Frantz Fanon`s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre uses this phrase when he speaks of revolutionary violence diverted towards the indigenous African religion: “Hocus-pocus and all the idols of the tribe descend among it, reign over its violence and waste it in a trance until exhaustion”. [7]. The movement appears in Charles Dickens` Little Dorrit, originally published as a serial between 1855 and 1857.