[cbfrench]

Now comes cbfrench and respectfully submits the following comment.

So they’ve discovered literary form and genre. Remarkable.

To be less snarky, my wife is a lawyer, while I am an Anglican priest (cue the jokes). Both of us are in fields where certain traditional literary forms—be it statutes, contracts, biblical texts, or liturgical prayers—play important roles. These forms tend to be inherently conservative because there is the sense among practitioners of both the law and the liturgy that things can go awry if one departs too far from established conventions, so it’s better to rely upon boilerplate conventions, which can actually be more efficient in spite of their syntactical convolutions. Indeed, C.S. Lewis makes the point w/r/t liturgical vs. extemporaneous prayer that formal, customary prayer frees one up actually to pray because one isn’t having to decide with every utterance whether or not one agrees. The extemporaneous prayer may be more “straightforward,” but it imposes its own set of cognitive burdens.

I would guess that legal writing operates similarly: boilerplate constructions have generally standard and agreed-upon meanings around which many of the substantive interpretive issues have already been resolved, which makes them on the whole more efficient. What law seeks to accomplish as a genre of writing depends upon striking a difficult balance among interpretive stability, capaciousness, and definitiveness, which necessitates certain concessions to what we might consider stylistic infelicity. (Plus, those concessions keep food on my table, so I’m rather grateful for them, lol.)

It shouldn’t be surprising or noteworthy that people who are asked to compose a bit of text in a particular genre respond by writing in a way that conforms to what they understand of its generic conventions. Similarly, if I asked people to write something that could be a passage from the Gospels, most people would probably produce a text with thees, thous, and verilys and that would also likely include something about sheep and being good to other people. They would do this because in their minds that is what “the Bible” ought to sound like. Likewise, if I asked you to compose thirty seconds of ad copy for a new car, you probably aren’t going to write it in the form of an epic prologue (“Ford and the man I sing…”).

We all have baseline understandings and expectations of what conventional forms look like and sound like, which are often tied to what the particular form is trying to convey or accomplish. So, perhaps legalese is a form of “incantation” trying to conjure up its own authority, but arguably so is every other literary form. That’s just how form works: if it doesn’t establish some implicit authority (even in the most rudimentary sense of “you should pay attention to this”), it’s effectively meaningless.

Further affiant sayeth naught.

[notarobot123]

I think this is the same with programming too. Professionals trust the traditions they have been inducted into and replicate its conventions encouraging novices to do the same. It quickly becomes _the_ way to do it.

More cynically, you could see this as professionals protecting preserving their position in society as practitioners of a magic that would be commonplace if translated into the vernacular of the laity.

[cbfrench]

Honestly, it’s probably a little of both. We’re all embedded in various communicative matrices, all of which have conventions to which we generally adhere because it’s how we were taught, it’s understandable by others (at least other guild members), and it makes communicating more efficient. There’s also a protective mindset to keep the uninitiated from peering too deeply into the mysteries—and thus rendering the work you do much less valuable.

This same study could have been conducted on medical writing and probably arrived at the same conclusions, except medical writing is probably even more jargon-laden than legalese, so I’m not sure a group of layfolk could produce a convincing parody of it.

In any event, I have the feeling this study could have been avoided by a trip across the quad to talk to someone in the English dept.

[Two4]

I use q as my iterator variable name in my for loop, everyone freaks out. I use j in an inner loop, everyone is fine - because it's all part of the plan.