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Improving poor legal drafting

June 19, 2017 by Cathy Wilcox

I promised to tell you the techniques used to improve that awful passage from the GDPR.  My six principles of a user-friendly drafting style came into their own:

  1. Prefer the active voice: I’ve kept just one passive because I felt it needed to be there to convey the legal meaning.
  2. Keep sentences under 40 words with an average sentence length of under 20 words:  When you use clauses and sub-clauses, you can count each sub-clause as a separate sentence, making the new average sentence length under 10 words.
  3. Choose simple words if possible:   I’ve got rid of “pseudonymisation” for example.  I am, however, stuck with words that mean something under data protection law, for example “process” and “state of the art”.
  4. Don’t use three words if one would do:  “In order to” becomes “to” and I’ve replaced “take account of” with “consider”.  “At the time of” becomes “When”.
  5. Avoid jargon (including legal jargon):   I’ve changed “shall” into “must”.  
  6. Don’t turn perfectly good verbs into nouns:  “The determination of” has changed to “deciding”.

Filed Under: Effective legal drafting, Plain English, Plain Language, StyleWriter

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