Easification

People sometimes think simplification means making documents shorter, but it often makes them longer. This is because we have to explain more concepts and assume less prior knowledge.

Vijay Bhatia is an expert in genre theory who taught law students to write clearly.

According to Bhatia, many legal texts are intentionally compact – formulaic, even. He refers to the

normal legal practice of including maximum information into a single sentence, making it compound as well as complex.

Traditional legal texts, then, are engineered to be economical and precise, but inevitably they can be difficult for those who do not share the right legal knowledge (and even for those who do).

So any attempt to simplify a legal document by reducing its length risks damaging its functionality. It’s the other way around – it will inevitably get longer. Bhatia’s demonstrations double or treble the length of the text.

Bhatia, though, does not want to simplify all the texts he teaches to law students, because he wants them to learn how to read legal language. So he introduces the term ‘easification’ to describe ways to guide them through. He experiments with diagramming, and guide questions such as those below.

As he puts it:

Easification is not only a technique for text presentation, but also a learning strategy which helps the learner to simplify the text for himself. In simplification the focus is on the text, whereas in easification it is on the learner.

This doesn’t just apply to legal texts, of course. And often both focuses are necessary. Simplify and easify. That is, simplify the text if you can, and also add things that will help the reader understand it and apply it.

1. Bhatia, V. K. (1983). Simplification v. easification—The case of legal texts. Applied Linguistics, 4, 42-54.

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