Last spring, I opened a new bank account. Among the forms, one on privacy had the boxes already checked. I asked if they were all mandatory: a Pandora’s box opened. To cut a long story short, it took a couple of meetings and several emails to clarify that, in fact, my consent was required but, equally, the text was worded in a way that was ambiguous, to say the least, and needed to be revised. The calculable waste of resources due to this misunderstanding: at least a few hundred euros. All because of a few poorly written sentences...

 A study previewed by the economic information website Lavoce.it estimates that if all Italian laws were written with the clarity of the Constitution, GDP would be almost 5 percent higher. The group of economists arrived at this assessment by calculating how much regulatory uncertainty, due in part to convoluted wording, reduces corporate investment and thus slows the country’s productivity.
Different context, similar conclusion: in the 1990s, two regional offices of the Veterans Benefits Administration, the US agency that provides services to veterans, launched the study “Writing for Real People.” They counted the number of phone calls received asking for information about a specific letter before and after rewriting it in a simpler way: they fell from around 1,110 to 200, that’s more than five times.

Lorenzo Carpanè teaches Italian at the Faculty of Engineering of the Free University of Bolzano and a consultant for the Palestra della scrittura agency: “The economic incentive is far from secondary when it comes to plain language.” One of their biggest clients, the Italian energy company Enel, saw a 60 percent drop in requests for clarification after the agency rewrote their contracts following the guidelines for plain language. Vodafone hired them for the same reason: to save resources.

“However, the economic advantage is not enough,” continues Carpanè, “plain language was created to promote citizenship, for example by allowing easy access to public administration, banking, and insurance services. The consumer movement was the first to mobilize during the 1970s in the United States. But political and institutional commitment is also needed.”

In the 1990s, then-US President Bill Clinton signed the “Memorandum on Plain Language in Government Writing,” asking federal agencies to write using plain language. Over time, South Africa, with a reference in its Constitution, New Zealand, and various Northern European countries have joined in. In Italy the Insurance Supervisory Authority was the first to take action in response to European legislation. At the same time, plain language became a specific field of study within linguistics.

In reality, plain language or as the EU calls it: clear language, not to be confused with easy language, which is mainly aimed at people with intellectual disabilities and reading difficulties (see box below), does not have a universally recognized definition. It is easier to define it by what it is not. To use the words of an MDS Notebook, a collection of Italian writing manuals for business writers “it is the antithesis of bureaucratese and its closest relatives, corporate speak, political jargon, and trade union language.”
ISO – the international standards body has published standards and there are also various guidelines in circulation, such as those of the European Commission: limit sentence length to approximately 20 words, cut out all unnecessary subordinate clauses and gerunds, and choose simple graphics. But the bulk of the work lies in focusing on what you want to say to whom, organizing your thoughts, and writing them down without adding unnecessary elements. In simple words, or better still, only the necessary ones.

“The International Plain Language association, of which I am a member, has analyzed the aspects covered by ISO standards and concluded that vocabulary accounts for only seven percent of the issues. The main problems that hinder comprehension are others,” explains Carpanè. “For example, top managers with twenty audit reports to read do not need a glossary of technical terms, as they are familiar with them. But when faced with a block of justified text, some languages have developed standard rules for easy language and long and convoluted sentences. As did the poor judge who received an appeal that came into my hands, with sentences of over 120 words each.”
“This is where the difficulty of measuring the comprehensibility of a text comes in,” echoes Eurac Research Linguist Elena Chiocchetti. “For Italian, there are quantitative indices such as GULPEASE, developed by Sapienza University of Rome: the index is a readability formula that assesses how easy a text is to understand based on letters per word and words per sentence, or READ-IT and Profiling-UD, from the CNR (the largest public research institution in Italy), which provide a numerical measure of the readability of a text. But readable does not equal understandable. To truly explain the content, it is sometimes necessary to clarify, explain, reduce, add, and do many other things to meet the reader’s prior level of knowledge.”

Chiocchetti and her colleagues have worked on simplifying workplace safety materials. They analyzed some excerpts using readability indices and found that the GULPEASE index improved from 42 to 53 –where a score below 40 indicates that even readers with higher education are likely to struggle with the text. However, Chiocchetti and her team also emphasized the importance of verifying the effectiveness of the texts with representatives of the target audience, as Chiocchetti notes, “First and foremost, you need to consider the people you are addressing.”

The linguists at Eurac Research have long been involved in simplifying information materials on workplace safety. The materials are in German and Italian, and this image shows an example. In addition to the language work, in this example we have also added a visual simplification: in the version below, the text is not justified and the font is more legible.

Credit: Eurac Research

Despite a documented decline in language skills and comprehension, difficult texts, such as regulations, contracts, and administrative forms, are not giving way. On the contrary, the gap with everyday language is widening.
“In certain professional contexts, habit prevails, as does the fear that simplifying will lead to a loss of precision and result in recourse being taken against you even though the opposite is actually true and, above all, the idea that only by using a certain way of expressing yourself will you gain credibility among your peers,” argues Carpanè.

Faced with the clichés characteristic of their profession, some people develop antibodies, such as the stringent language manifesto of the daily newspaper Il Post, some ironize it, and some are still at its mercy.
Chiocchetti recounts an anecdote. At the end of a series of lectures on the simplification of legal language at the University of Trento, a young student plucked up the courage to ask: “For years we have struggled to learn how to use extremely complicated formulations like real lawyers, now are you are asking us to dismantle everything?”
“She wasn't wrong,” comments Chiocchetti. “It may seem paradoxical, but one thing does not exclude the other. True competence is knowing how to change register depending on the context: being able to use insider language among professionals yet also knowing how to explain a rule simply to those who do not have the same legal expertise.”

 After all, when it comes to communication, the truth will out: without expertise and plain ideas about what you want to say and to whom, talking about register, tone of voice, and style yields few results. Designer and intellectual Bruno Munari wrote: “Complicating is easy, simplifying is difficult... What cannot be said in a few words cannot be said in many either.”