Why is the small print so hard to read?
Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language
Contracts are hard to read not because law is complicated, but because they’re written in a tangled way.
Ig Nobel 2022
Researchers analysed thousands of legal contracts and compared them with ordinary English. They then asked people to read and remember contract passages written either in legalese or in plain language.
The main culprits were clauses stuffed inside other clauses and rare jargon words. Rewritten in plain English, the same passages were understood and remembered better. Whereas the party of the first part hereinafter agrees.
The small print is hard on purpose-ish.