Legal Writing

According to a story I once heard, when the United States and the USSR were planning their first joint space mession, planners thought hard about how the language barrier would be crossed, especially in the perilous situations that could occur in space flight. Naturally, the American astronauts were taught Russian, and the Soviet cosmonauts were taught English. But which language should be used when, and by whom?

The answer may surprise you. After extensive study, NASA announced that the U.S. crew would always speak Russian, and the Soviet crew would always speak English. Why? Because the speaker, who knew what he wanted to say, could more easily do the work of mental translation. With lives at stake, the listener should not have to both mentally translate and absorb new information.

This principle applies to everything we write, even to speakers of our own language. We know what we want to say, so we bear the burden of making our message as easy as possible for our reader to understand.

This week, as you revise, pretend that your reader speaks a langauge different from yours.  Write as clearly as you can, so your reader cannot misunderstand.