Plain Language

Plain English: A Charter for Clear Writing@(Part Three)

By Joseph Kimble

This article was originally published inApril 1992, in the Thomas M. CooleyLaw Review. We have shortened it here.Some of the omissions are indicated; mostare not.

The article grew out of a resolutionthat I submitted two years ago to the Le-gal Writing Institute, whose membershipincludes writing teachers at almost alllaw schools in the United States. The res-olution has now been adopted by the 1992Conference of the Institute, and the votewas virtually unanimous. The resolutionas adopted appears toward the end ofPart One of this excerpt, and toward thebeginning of Part Two and Part Three.

The resolution is good news for plainwriting, for if it is ever going to happen,we must poison the well of legalese at thesource-which is law school.

-JK

Myths and Realitieshis is a big subject and one thatcannot be covered in a short sec-tion. There's a great deal of mis-

information about Plain English andseveral persistent myths.

© Copyright 1992 Thomas M. Cooley Law Re-view. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

"Plain Language" is a regular feature of theMkhigan Bar Journal, edited by JosephKimble for the State Bar Plain English Com-mittee. Assistant editor is George H. Hathaway.Through this column the Committee hopes topromote the use of plain English in the law.Want to contribute a plain English article?Contact Prof. Kimble at Thomas Cooley LawSchool, P.O. Box 13038, Lansing, MI 48901.

Myth: Plain English advocates wantfirst-grade prose, or want to reducewriting to the lowest common de-nominator.

Not true. We advocate writing thatis as simple and direct as the cir-cumstances allow. Not simplistic orsimple-minded. Not Dick-and-Jane.Not street talk or slang. But the styleyou would use if your readers weresitting across the table, and you wantedto make sure they understood.

In the past six or seven years, thePlain English Committee in Michiganhas translated hundreds of passagesinto Plain English and has helped torevise dozens of forms. As far as I know,the Committee has not heard even oncethat its Plain English versions changedthe meaning, or were simple-minded,or were inferior to the originals. Afterall the translations offered by all thecommentators, you rarely hear any suchcomplaint.78 Then you wonder howmany translations and testimonials itwill take for critics to realize that it canbe successfully done.

Myth: Plain English does not allowfor literary effect or recognize the cere-monial value of legal language.

Again, not true. Plain English hasnothing against an attractive writingstyle; or against a rhetorical flourish orstrategy in the right context, such as apersuasive brief; or against "the truth,the whole truth, and nothing but thetruth" to convey a sense of gravity inthe courtroom. These things are a mat-ter of context, judgment, effectiveness,and degree.

But those who would argue literaryvalue need to keep three points inmind. First, although the law has hadits share of fine stylists, it has been

overwhelmed by legalese. RememberJohn Lindsey's comment about "lawbooks, the largest body of poorly writ-ten literature ever created by the humanrace."79 Also remember this warning:"[H]ow do people write who are notprofessionals or accomplished ama-teurs? The answer is: badly, at alltimes."80 For most workaday writers,just writing plainly is a worthy and dif-ficult goal.

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That's the next point. Plain Englishhas a literary heritage of its own, theAttic style, as Bryan Garner has ex-plained.81 It is the style of Mark Twain,and Justice Holmes, and George Or-well, and Winston Churchill, and E. B.White, and even Truman Capote, whosaid, "I think most writers, even thebest, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite.Simple, clear as a country creek."82

Plain English is the style of H. WFowler, whose Dictionary of ModernEnglish Usage83 is one of the great booksof this century. It was Fowler and hisbrother, in another book, who set outthese congenial suggestions:

Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.

Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.

Prefer the single word to the circum-locution.

Prefer the short word to the long.

Prefer the Saxon word to the Ro-mance.

84

Plain words are eternally fresh, and theynever need apology. In every context,simplicity has a beauty of its own.

Finally, there is little room for lit-erary effect in one form of legal writ-ing-the neutral style of statutes, con-tracts, wills, consumer forms, and thelike. Our late patriarch of legal draft-ing, Reed Dickerson, describes it as"nonemotive" and "pure exposition."85

Yet legal drafting is where the legaleseis thickest. Goodbye metaphor, hellohereinbefore.

Myth: Plain English is impossiblebecause legal writing includes so manyterms of art.

Legal writing and analysis may in-deed involve terms of art, such asplaintiff and hearsay. Legitimate termsof art convey in a word or two a set-tled, circumscribed meaning.

But how many terms of art arethere? Bryan Garner estimates fewerthan fifty.86 One study of a real-estatesales contract found that only threepercent of the words had significantlegal meaning based on precedent.87 In

short, terms of art are but a tiny partof any legal paper. The rest of the pa-per can be written in Plain English.

The task for legal writers is to sep-arate real terms of art from all therubble. The one indispensable guideis Garner's Dictionary of Modem LegalUsage (1987).

Myth: Plain English is impossiblebecause the law deals with compli-cated ideas that require great precision.

First, much of what Plain Englishopposes has nothing to do with pre-cision. The word hereby does not addan iota of precision. Said plaintiff is nomore precise than the plaintiff. In theevent of default on the part of the buyeris no more precise than if the buyerdefaults.

Second, David Mellinkoff's bookshave disposed of the idea that tradi-tional legal writing is precise.88 If any-thing, the opposite is true, and PlainEnglish does more for precision thanlegalese. Robert Eagleson explains:

I have now worked on a series of legaldocuments with various teams of law-yers and legislative drafters as we havesought to convert them into plain Eng-lish. There has not been one in whichwe have not uncovered some error, orinconsistency or ambiguity .... For allthe claims made for it, traditional legallanguage is not a security against im-precision. On the contrary, the sheersyntactic complexity of long ramblingsentences provides a ready cover forimprecision.... Legal minds becomedeadened by the turgidity of languageso that they miss the drafter's unin-tended slip.

Plain language of itself is no guaranteeof a sound underlying legal solution.It must be coupled with clear think-ing. But at least plainness of languagemakes it more difficult for errors injudgment to go undetected .... 89

Third, it follows that Plain Englishprinciples can usually make even com-plicated ideas more clear. Or if notmore clear, at least as clear as can be.A difficult subject does not have tobe compounded by a difficult style. No

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subject is too complex to benefit fromPlain English.90

Anyway, for a better look at themyths, you should see a devastatingarticle by Robert Benson 9' and the re-port on Plain English by the Law Re-form Commission of Victoria, Austra-lia.92 Whatever the excesses of someproponents, I believe they have the bet-ter side of the argument. The argu-ments on the other side are, if not bad,then not good enough. Unfortunately,though, "most lawyers ... simply havenot yet learned of the hard evidencethat has undermined the traditionalrationales."93

No, legalese and traditional stylepersist for the same reasons as al-ways-habit, inertia, fear of change,the overwhelming influence of poormodels, the rote use of forms, andnotions of self-interest (prestige andcontrol). Not to mention lack of skill.George Gopen is certainly right whenhe reminds us: "[Niow that the lawsays we must write in Plain English,we have to educate our new lawyers sothey will be able to do so."94

Perhaps the greatest myth of all, then,and one that even a few proponentsmay accept, is that Plain English canbe produced on demand. Some partsof it are relatively easy, like avoidinglegal jargon. Without any strain, weought to be able to let go of hereby andsaid [whatever] and further affiant sayethnot. But the greater part of clear writ-ing only looks easy. It takes trainingand work and fair time to compose-all part of the lawyer's craft.

Is it worth the effort? It is if you careabout whether your reader will under-stand and how the reader will respond.

Reality: Legalese fails all the tests,and readers prefer Plain English.

Professor Benson has carefully re-viewed the literature and performedhis own tests to show that lawyers' lan-guage is not understood. He describesfour kinds of evidence. First is the edu-cated guess among "scores of thought-ful experts" that legalese fails to com-municate.95 Second, legalese fails the

field tests: thousands of litigated cases;tests by the Internal Revenue Service;and a host of anecdotal, but none-theless real, stories.96 Third, legalesefails the comprehension tests: multiple-choice tests; oral questioning; so-calleddoze tests on jury instructions, on aconsent-to-surgery form, and on partsof a statute; tests of consumer con-tracts; and more tests of jury instruc-tions.97 Fourth, legalese fails the read-ability formulas: the Flesch test; theDale-Chall test; and Edward Fry's in-fluential Graph for Estimating Read-ability-all of which are useful in de-tecting sick language. 98

You can add two more to the fieldtests. The Plain Language Institute, inVancouver, British Columbia, commis-sioned a survey of 600 residents aboutlegal language. Predictably, 64% saidthey are frustrated when they readlegal documents; 57% said that legaldocuments are poorly written and hardto read; and 33% said that lawyers donot even try to communicate with theaverage person.99 That last figure-theeffort to communicate-was the poor-est rating received by any profession inthe survey.100

A year earlier, the Document DesignCenter surveyed the readers of Mod-em Maturity magazine about businessand government forms, and receivedalmost 4000 responses. Once again,48% of the respondents said the formsare too complicated; 47% said the in-structions were unclear; 23% said thewords were too difficult; 58% stoppedusing the service or organization, orgave up trying to fill out the form; 41%needed help in filling out the form;and most people were frustrated andangry.10' All in all:

The federal government, insurance com-panies, private hospitals, individual doc-tors, and a wide variety of corpora-tions, organizations and agencies havecreated a mountain of unclear forms,notices and letters that plague peopleat every income level. They aggravateand upset us; they cost us untold dol-lars in lost benefits, entitlements andservices.102

So legalese and officialese do notcommunicate. As you would expect,then, another body of evidence showsthat readers prefer Plain English andfind it more persuasive.

A survey conducted for the State Barof California found that 90%/ of thepublic and 91% of the lawyers re-sponding said there is a need for sim-pler legal documents. 03

In another California study, ten ap-pellate judges and their research attor-neys, reading passages from appellatebriefs, rated the passages written in le-galese as "substantively weaker and lesspersuasive than the plain English ver-sions"10 4 And contrary to what law-yers might think, the readers "inferredthat the attorneys who wrote in legal-ese possessed less professional pres-tige than those who wrote in plainEnglish." 0 5

In one more study, a student and Iprepared a survey of judges and law-yers that has now been done in Mich-igan, 06 Florida,10 7 Louisiana,108 andTexas. 10 9 The survey form invited read-ers to choose between the A or B ver-sion of six different paragraphs. Onechoice was written in Plain English.The other choice had some of the com-mon characteristics of legalese, in-cluding obsolete formalisms, archaicwords, wordy phrases, doublets, ab-stract nouns created from strong verbs,passive voice, long sentences, and in-trusive phrases."0 Neither the surveyform nor the cover letter referred to"Plain English" or "legalese." Readerswere simply asked to check off theirpreference for the A or B version ofeach paragraph.

In every state, at least 50% of thereaders responded."' A total of 1462judges and lawyers returned the sur-vey."2 And in all four states, they pre-ferred the Plain English versions bymargins running from 80 to 86%.1 3 Alandslide.

When the discussion of legal writ-ing turns to concrete examples, wenaturally prefer Plain English. As read-ers we prefer it. That is the message-and the moral imperative-for writers.

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If we expect the other person's writingto be simple and direct, we had betterdemand it of our own.

Writing is a public act that presumessomeone else's time. We have no rightto waste it with dense, inflated, ob-scure prose. Robert Eagleson has writ-ten eloquently about "being fair toreaders."114 This is a fundamental prin-ciple of Plain English.

The moral argument works at an-other, more subtle level as well:

Human beings, we need to remind our-selves here, are social beings.... We be-come uneasy if, for extended periods oftime, we neither hear nor see other peo-ple. We feel uneasy with the OfficialStyle for the same reason. It has nohuman voice, no face, no personalitybehind it. It creates no society, encour-ages no social conversation. We feelthat it is unreal.115

Reality: Plain English saves time andmoney, and is good for business.

The U.S. Department of Commercehas documented in twelve case studieshow, when a company simplifies itslanguage, "it builds business ... stream-lines procedures, eliminates unnec-essary forms, and reduces customercomplaints."116 Here are some otherreported examples:

e The Federal Communications Com-mission rewrote its regulations for cit-izen-band radios and was able to re-assign five employees who had donenothing but answer questions.117

e By revising its forms, Citibank re-duced the time spent training staffby 50% and improved the accuracyof the information that staff gave tocustomers."8

* Southern California Gas Companysimplified its billing statement and issaving an estimated $252,000 a yearfrom reduced customer inquiries.119

* After Ford Motor Company produceda Plain English version of the owner'sguide for its Ford Taurus, 85% of thepeople tested said they preferred thePlain English version.120

* In England, the Department ofHealth and Social Security saved

$2,069,000 in staff time in the year thatit redesigned the application forms forlegal aid.121

• Also in England, the Department ofCustoms and Excise cut a 55% errorrate to 3% by revising some lost-baggageforms used by airline passengers.122

* Since the British Government be-gan its review of forms in 1982, ithas scrapped 27,000 forms, rede-signed 41,000 forms, and saved over$28,000,000.123

e In Australia, by rewriting one legaldocument alone, the Victorian Govern-ment saved the equivalent of $400,000a year in staff salaries'24

* In a study for the Law Reform Com-mission of Victoria, lawyers and lawstudents read parts of statutes writtenin traditional style and in Plain English,and the mean time that they took tocomprehend the Plain English versionswas between a third and a half of themean time for comprehending the tra-ditional versions.125

* Also in Australia, after an informa-tion booklet about housing loans wasrewritten, a survey showed that thePlain English version significantly in-creased the level of understanding; re-duced by half the number of inquiriesand the time needed to deal with inquir-ies; and reduced reading time, printingcosts, and storage space.126

Think how much of the work ofbusiness and government and law isdone through forms and form let-ters. Multiply hundreds of thousandsof forms by millions of people, andyou get an idea of the confusion andfrustration produced by bad designand bad writing.

Nobody expects lawyers to redraftall their forms overnight. Forms andstatutes can be rewritten into PlainEnglish gradually, one at a time, proj-ect by project. The important thing isto get started.

Tomorrow, lawyers can stop writingNow comes the plaintiff. They can stoptrying to cite every case and trying tocover every remote contingency un-der the sun. Appellate judges can stopwriting law review articles for opin-ions. Large firms can hire in-houseeditors. Committees that draft rulescan use writing experts. Most of all,the profession can have a change ofattitude and can stop imagining thatthe old style has merit.

Reality: Legalese has created disre-spect for lawyers and for law.

Everybody says so. Just look atthe catalog of protests and ridicule. 127

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image. Bryan Garner: "There's proba-bly no single reform that would im-prove the image of lawyers more thanto get them to speak plainly and di-rectly and understandably."128 RobertEagleson: "If lawyers would improvetheir image, increase their proficiency,and sharpen their competitive edge,they must get rid of gobbledegook fromlegal language:" " 29

Judge Robert Miner, U.S. Court ofAppeals for the Second Circuit, evenconcludes that the inability to com-municate "diminishes the service ofthe bar, impedes the resolution ofdisputes, retards legal progress andgrowth, and, ultimately, underminesthe rule of law."1 30

For not doing a better job of train-ing lawyers to write, the legal profes-sion has paid a terrible price.

Why Us?Why should the Legal Writing In-

stitute adopt this resolution? Becausewe teach writing. And writing-that isto say, thinking on paper or computerscreen-is the most important skill ofall. As law schools and the legal pro-fession have finally come to realize, thepractice of law is largely writing:

The law is very much a writing pro-fession.... It's ironic to me, and wasironic to me during twenty years of lawteaching, that we spend almost all ourtime in law school enhancing the oralskills of our students and so little timeenhancing the written skills. And yet ifyou walk up and down the halls of anylaw firm in the country, you will dis-cover that lawyers are all day, everyday writing.131

The American Bar Association hassaid the same thing repeatedly. It said

Joseph Kimble is anassociate professor atThomas Cooley LawSchool. He teaches re-search and writing, le-gal methods, and legaldrafting.

so in a report that recommended threeyears of writing in law school:

Given the central importance of effec-tive writing to a wide range of lawyerwork, the Task Force believes that toofew students receive rigorous trainingand experience in legal writing dur-ing their three years of law study....[Miany students, probably most stu-dents, receive very little opportunity towrite with close supervision and cri-tique as a continuing part of their lawschool experience.

132

The ABA said it again in a later reporton legal education:

Legal writing is at the heart of lawpractice, so it is especially vital thatlegal writing skills be developed andnurtured through carefully supervisedinstruction.

133

Very recently, an ABA Task Force de-scribed as "fundamental lawyeringskills" three skills that are taught pri-marily in legal writing courses-legalanalysis and reasoning, legal research,and effective communication.134

I know that my writing guidelines,set out last month, figure in only partof what we are expected to teach in ourwriting programs. They want us toteach, in about four credit hours, allthis: the whole of legal research; legalreasoning; how to analyze, synthesize,and apply law; the form of a legalmemorandum; the form of a persua-sive brief; in many law schools, le-gal drafting (which should be requiredeverywhere); other kinds of advancedwriting, such as litigation documents;in all these kinds of writing, how tostructure the document, write effectiveparagraphs and sentences, and choosewords; and everything right down togrammar and citation form. Still, forthe part of writing that has to do withclarity and simplicity, the teachersshould be able to agree on a charter.

[Omitted here are references to about30 books on legal writing, all of whichrecommend Plain English.]

A resolution by the Legal Writing In-stitute would have practical and sym-bolic value. Practical value, becauseeven a small group of persons, working

in their state, can make a difference. 35

And if the Institute ever did publish aset of guidelines, they too would helpto improve legal writing. Again, guide-lines are no guarantee of good writing,but they can point the way and marksome of the worst pitfalls.

The symbolic value is equally im-portant. After four centuries, we haveto somehow break the cycle, get law-yers' attention, do something. Plain Eng-lish has had some success in break-ing through the barriers. 136 It deserveswhatever support and credibility andguidance that writing teachers canprovide.

For if lawyers cannot do at least thismuch, cannot take even the easier stepstoward Plain English, cannot get overthe emotional attachment to legalese,then we will never get out of the muck.The campaign has to start in law school,and be carried unstintingly to practic-ing lawyers. Too often, I have heardfrom former students that their newemployer "doesn't want it that way."Time should change that, as this gen-eration becomes the employers, or atleast can make its own decisions.

As I tell my students: "The revolu-tion starts with you." U

Footnotes78. For two complaints, one valid and one

arguable, see Reed Dickerson, Materialson Legal Drafting 285-88 (1981) (object-ing to a translation by Rudolf Flesch ofDickerson's revision of a federal statute);Kenneth M. Mogill, Revised ReasonableDoubt Instructions: Reductio ad Nihil, orThe Case Against "Simplification," Crim.Def. Newsl. (Mich. State Appellate De-fender Office, Detroit, Mich.), Feb.-Mar.1991, at 1 (objecting to a Plain Englishversion of a jury instruction on reason-able doubt).

79. John M. Lindsey, The Legal Writing Mal-ady: Causes and Cures, N.Y. L.J., Dec. 12,1990, at 2.

80. Jacques Barzun, English As She's NotTaught, in On Writing, Editing, and Pub-lishing 18, 19 (2d ed. 1986).

81. Bryan A. Garner, The Elements of LegalStyle 7-15 (1991).

82. Truman Capote, Music for Chameleonsxvii (1980).

83. H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of ModemEnglish Usage (Sir Ernest Gowers 2d ed.1965).

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84. H.W. Fowler & E.G. Fowler, The King'sEnglish 11 (3d ed. 1931).

85. Reed Dickerson, The Fundamentals ofLegal Drafting 4 (2d ed. 1986).

86. Garner, supra note 81, at 184; cf. RobertW Benson, Plain English Comes to Court,Litigation, Fall 1986, at 21, 24 ("Surely,the list does not exceed 100 terms.").

87. Benson Barr et al., Legalese and the Mythof Case Precedent, 64 Mich. B.J. 1136(1985).

88. David Mellinkoff, The Language of theLaw 290-398 (1963); Legal Writing: Senseand Nonsense 2-12 (1982).

89. Robert D. Eagleson, Plain English-ABoon For Lawyers, The Second Draft (Le-gal Writing Institute), Oct. 1991, at 12,12-13.

90. See Rudolf Flesch, How to Write PlainEnglish 3 (1979) ("Rule Number One-stick to Plain English through thick andthin."); Robert P. Charrow & Veda R.Charrow, Making Legal Language Under-standable: A Psycholinguistic Study of JuryInstructions, 79 Colum. L. Rev. 1306, 1335(1979) ("[E]ven jury instructions con-taining very complex concepts can bemade more understandable when theirlanguage is simplified'"). For further evi-dence that Plain English improves com-prehension, see, e.g., Amiram Elworket al., Making Jury Instructions Under-standable §§ 1-3, 3-1 to -2 (1982); DavidS. Kaufer et al., Revising Medical ConsentForms: An Empirical Model and Test, 11Law, Medicine & Health Care 155, 162(1983); Walter W. Steele, Jr. & ElizabethG. Thornburg, Jury Instructions: A Persis-tent Failure to Communicate, 74 Judicature249, 250-51 (1991); Document DesignCenter, Study of Schedule C, Form 1040(undated) (on file with author) (summa-rizing a study showing that 69% of thosetested preferred the new form and com-pleted it faster with a high degree of ac-curacy). Cf. Joyce Hannah Swaney et al.,Editing for Comprehension: Improving theProcess Through Reading Protocols, in PlainLanguage: Principles and Practice 173(Erwin R. Steinberg ed., 1991). In a testof four documents, readers made fewererrors on three of the revised versions,and read two of them faster. After furtherstudy and improvements (including theuse of examples), readers made fewer er-rors on the fourth as well. But see RobynPenman, Communication Research Insti-tute of Australia, Occasional Paper No.14, Comprehensible Insurance Docu-ments: Plain English Isn't Good Enough(1990). In a test of insurance policies,readers had as much difficulty with theconcepts in the Plain English versions asin the original version.

91. Robert W. Benson, The End of Legalese:The Game is Over, 13 N.Y.U. Rev. L. &Soc. Change 519, 558-73 (1984-1985).

92. Plain English and the Law 45-62 (1987;repr. 1990) (including the myths thatthere is not enough time to draft in PlainEnglish, and that Plain English requiresevery single law to be intelligible to theaverage citizen).

93. Benson, supra note 91, at 569.94. George D. Gopen, The State of Legal Writ-

ing: Res Ipsa Loquitur, 86 Mich. L. Rev.333, 354 (1987); see also Benson, supranote 91, at 570 (noting that "many law-yers have fooled themselves into believ-ing" they are good with words, and thathaving to learn the techniques of clearcommunication is a "painful prospect []for incompetent writers").

95. Benson, supra note 91, at 532.96. Id. at 532-36.97. Id. at 536-47.98. Id. at 547-58.99. Report by the Angus Reid Group, Inc., for

the Plain Language Institute, B.C. Read-ers' Survey: An Assessment of the Com-prehensibility of Selected Legal Docu-ments 6, 12 (1991) (A summary of thereport, including technical data, is avail-able from the Plain Language Institute.).

100. Id. at 6.101. Carolyn Boccella Bagin & Andrew M.

Rose, Worst Forms Unearthed, ModernMaturity, Feb.-Mar. 1991, at 64, 65; Caro-lyn Boccella Bagin & Andrew M. Rose,Frustrated and Confused: What PeopleTold Us About Bad Forms 9 (unpub-lished news release, on file with author).

102. Bagin & Rose, Worst Forms Unearthed,supra note 101, at 64.

103. State Bar Report, Cal. Law., Oct. 1989,at 87.

104. Robert W. Benson & Joan B. Kessler,Legalese v. Plain English: An EmpiricalStudy of Persuasion and Credibility inAppellate Brief Writing, 20 Loy. L.A. L.Rev. 301, 301 (1987).

105. Id. at 301-02.106. Steve Harrington & Joseph Kimble, Sur-

vey: Plain English Wins Every Which Way,66 Mich. B.J. 1024 (1987). The surveyform was reported a little incorrectly inthis article. For the correct version, seeJoseph Kimble & Joseph A. Prokop, Jr.,Strike Three for Legalese, 69 Mich. B.J.418, 419 (1990).

107. Barbara Child, Language Preferences ofJudges and Lawyers: A Florida Survey, 64Fla. B.J. 32 (1990).

108. Joseph A. Prokop, Jr., Simply Tell It to theJudge, 38 La. B.J. 333 (1991) (survey ofjudges only).

109. Kevin Dubose, The Court Has Ruled, TheSecond Draft (Legal Writing Institute),Oct. 1991, at 8 (survey of judges only).

110. Kimble & Prokop, supra note 106, at 418.111. Dubose, supra note 109, at 9.112. Id.113. Id.114. Robert D. Eagleson, Writing in Plain

English 4 (1990).115. Richard A. Lanham, Revising Prose 66

(2d ed. 1987).116. Office of Consumer Affairs, U.S. Dep't of

Commerce, How Plain English Works forBusiness v (1984).

117. Plain Language Pays, Simply Stated (Doc-ument Design Center), Feb. 1986, at 1, 4.

118. Id. at 4.119. Gas Utilities Switch to Plain Language,

Simply Stated ... in Business (DocumentDesign Center), Mar. 1986, at 2, 2.

120. Plain English Pays, Simply Stated (Docu-ment Design Center), Mar. 1989, at 1, 1.

121. Plain Language Pays, supra note 117, at 4.122. Id. at 1, 4.123. Eagleson, supra note 114, at 6.124. Id.125. Eagleson, supra note 89, at 12.126. Eagleson, supra note 114, at 6.127. See, e.g., Benson, supra note 91, at 520-22,

527-29.128. Quoted in Stephanie J. Johnston, Dallas

Lawyer Leads the Fight for Plain Languagein the Law, Bar Leader, July-Aug. 1991, at24, 27.

129. Eagleson, supra note 89, at 13.130. Roger J. Miner, Confronting the Commu-

nication Crisis in the Legal Profession, 34N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 1, 1 (1989).

131. Richard D. Lee, Presentation at the An-nual Meeting of the Association of Amer-ican Law Schools, Mini-Workship on Le-gal Writing Throughout the Law SchoolCurriculum (Jan. 3, 1991) (audiotapeavailable from Recorded Resources Corp.,Millersville, Md.).

132. Section of Legal Education and Admis-sions to the Bar, American Bar Associa-tion, Report and Recommendations ofthe Task Force on Lawyer Competency:The Role of the Law Schools 15 (1979).

133. Council of the Section of Legal Educa-tion and Admissions to the Bar, Ameri-can Bar Association, Long-Range Plan-ning for Legal Education in the UnitedStates 29 (1987).

134. Task Force on Law Schools and the Pro-fession: Narrowing the Gap, AmericanBar Association, Statement of Fundamen-tal Lawyering Skills and ProfessionalValues 18-30, 41-44 (Tent. Draft 1991).

135. See Mark Mathewson, Verbatim, StudentLaw., Mar. 1988, at 9 (describing someactivities of the Plain English Committeeof the State Bar of Michigan).

136. See Barbara Child, Drafting Legal Docu-ments 88-89 (1988); Joseph Kimble,Plain English: A Charter for Clear Writing,9 Cooley L. Rev. 1, 31-58 (1992).

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