Plain Language Translations of American Divorce Law
171something for the first time, but a person can learn to read a variety of
fonts rather quickly. All it takes is familiarity (Dehaene 2009).
With those remarks in mind, we note this admonition by Transcend:
ALL CAPS slow the reader down. Better ways to emphasize text include
the following:
x Using boldface sparingly for a word, phrase, or short sentence.
x Using italics for emphasis or to identify foreign words.
Use underlines and strikeouts only for editing. Don’t use reverse text,^14 as
it does not fax or photocopy well.Insofar as these font alterations clutter the page, Transcend’s point is
well taken, and they do indeed slow the reader down, as shown by
Transcend’s (and others’) field tests. But the cognitive fact is simply that
the problem is one of unfamiliarity. If someone were to be exposed to such
writing on a regular basis, then that person would soon be able to read it
with ease. (Indeed, we may have solved the cognitive riddle of those
commenters on blogs and Facebook who seem inclined to use ALL CAPS
all the time. They are used to it, like the woman who continually shouts
because her husband is hard of hearing.)
Terminology issues
As noted above, lawyers often litigate over terms. The legal terms that
would be labeled as jargon terms are no exception. There have been many
attempts to try to grasp the totality of American legal terminology and its
ontology, but none have been done from a cognitive linguistics
perspective. Likewise, as noted earlier, the use of American legal corpora
for linguistic research has also not occurred. Mostly, we have specialists
who write dictionaries and other specialists who complain about them.
Almost immediately, one learns in law school not to trust legal dictionaries
to complete one’s understanding of a legal concept, and that holds doubly
true for jargon terms. First-year law students and other students who need
to work with legal terms, such as paralegals and administration of justice
students, quickly learn that they will need to do substantial research to
determine whether a particular jargon term applies in the situation being
studied. Legal book sets such as the aforementioned Words and Phrases
and keyword searches in legal databases are taught very early.
(^14) Reverse text is the use of white or light-colored letters against a black or dark-
colored background.