In recent years New Zealand has seen an increasing awareness of the need for
and the benefits of providing readily understandable business and government doc
uments. In this paper I report a psycholinguistic study testing the level of con
sumer comprehension of bank contracts and the effect of using plain English to
rewrite them. The plain versions encouraged subjects to read the documents more
carefully than they read the original versions, and the subjects understood the con
tent and implications better when the contracts were written in plain English. The
most effective means of enhancing comprehension was that which included both
lexical and syntactic manipulation of text. Subjects said that they preferred the
plain English versions of the contracts to the traditional versions.
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