How New Zealand Consumers Respond to Plain English

Abstract

In recent years New Zealand has seen an increasing awareness of the need forand the benefits of providing readily understandable business and government documents. In this paper I report a psycholinguistic study testing the level of consumer comprehension of bank contracts and the effect of using plain English torewrite them. The plain versions encouraged subjects to read the documents morecarefully than they read the original versions, and the subjects understood the content and implications better when the contracts were written in plain English. Themost effective means of enhancing comprehension was that which included bothlexical and syntactic manipulation of text. Subjects said that they preferred theplain English versions of the contracts to the traditional versions.