Poor writing is why you can’t understand contracts

The introduction to the 2022 paper on legal writing (Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language) says:

Contracts, such as online terms of service agreements, are at once ubiquitous and impenetrable, read by virtually everyone yet understood by seemingly no one, except lawyers.

The research identifies 4 specific examples of poor writing which are more prevalent in contracts, their impact on how readers understand those elements (compared to plain language versions) and suggested ways to avoid them.

The 4 issues that contract professionals, contract writers and lawyers need to avoid are:

1. Poor sentence structures – predominantly where clausal text or definitions were in the middle of a sentence, also known as centre-embedded text. This is where there are two distinct items of content, one embedded within the other; it is notoriously difficult to understand. These appear twice as commonly in legal documents than in other documents. 
2. Random capitalisation – also known as non-standard capitalisation. This could be for specific words, or whole clauses (especially for specific clauses in documents used the US). 
3. Poor word choice – often relying on jargon and legalese, or words which are infrequently used in everyday speech. The research showed that the main barrier to understanding was not a lack of familiarity with the concepts but the terminology itself. 
4. Lack of clarity over who is doing an action – ie an over-reliance on the passive voice.