> In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to write stories about those crimes.
> ...
> “When writing laws, they did a lot of center-embedding regardless of whether or not they had to edit it or write it from scratch. And in that narrative text, they did not use center-embedding in either case,” Martinez says.
How can such a study explain "why" legal documents "are written in an incomprehensible style?" Seems to me it would only tell you that legal documents conventionally have a particular style that even laymen are aware of an know how to mimic.
If you wanted to get at the "why," I'd think you'd need to do historical analysis and talk to and test lawyers instead of laymen.
Thank you, I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger point of discussion. The whole methodology and the conclusions drawn are dubious at best. I guess most people didn't read the article!
> ...
> “When writing laws, they did a lot of center-embedding regardless of whether or not they had to edit it or write it from scratch. And in that narrative text, they did not use center-embedding in either case,” Martinez says.
How can such a study explain "why" legal documents "are written in an incomprehensible style?" Seems to me it would only tell you that legal documents conventionally have a particular style that even laymen are aware of an know how to mimic.
If you wanted to get at the "why," I'd think you'd need to do historical analysis and talk to and test lawyers instead of laymen.