Implementation of Plain English in Legal Writing

This article reviews the benefits of using Plain English in legal documents. Plain English is generally described as a reader-focused communication that provides information in a way that makes it easier for the reader to find, understand, and use the information.

Non-lawyers often have difficulty understanding traditional legal writing. Complex and lengthy sentences, redundancies, wordiness, archaic words and Latin phrases and are common features of traditional legal writing. They tend, however, to inhibit comprehension and become barriers to understanding. To demonstrate how Plain English can improve legal writing, this article takes a step-by-step review of the movement to adopt Plain English, provides some definitions of it, and substantiates the importance of Plain English in legal drafting. Also, this article highlights Plain English movement and policy in Uzbekistan.