This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Campbell, N. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

How New Zealand Consumers Respond to Plain English

University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

In recent years New Zealand has seen an increasing awareness of the need for and the benefits of providing readily understandable business and government doc uments. In this paper I report a psycholinguistic study testing the level of con sumer comprehension of bank contracts and the effect of using plain English to rewrite them. The plain versions encouraged subjects to read the documents more carefully than they read the original versions, and the subjects understood the con tent and implications better when the contracts were written in plain English. The most effective means of enhancing comprehension was that which included both lexical and syntactic manipulation of text. Subjects said that they preferred the plain English versions of the contracts to the traditional versions.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				R. N. Conaway and W. J. Wardrope Communication in Latin America: An Analysis of Guatemalan Business Letters Business Communication Quarterly, December 1, 2004; 67(4): 465 - 474. [Abstract] [PDF]