Legal documents, such as contracts or deeds, are notoriously difficult for nonlawyers to understand. A new study from MIT cognitive scientists has determined just why these documents are often so impenetrable. After analyzing thousands of legal contracts and comparing them to other types of texts, the researchers found that lawyers have a habit of frequently inserting long definitions in the middle of sentences. Linguists have previously demonstrated that this type of structure, known as “center-embedding,” makes text much more difficult to understand. While center-embedding had the most significant effect on…
