Kishore Pariyar: the voice of clarity in banking and bureaucracy

In today's post, I am happy to profile Kishore Pariyar, a plain language hero. He has practised and advocated plain language in his roles at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and at top positions within the government as well as at international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This is no small achievement, given the entrenched ways of writing in bureaucratic and banking circles.

I present an edited email interview with Pariyar, who currently lives in Siliguri after retiring from government service. 

What does plain language mean to you? 

Plain language means writing in a simple and clear way. Laypersons are able to understand it easily without professional help. 

Sometimes sentences are written in a complex way to avoid legal risks. Because of this, people may not understand the real meaning. They may even need to pay professionals for help. Plain language solves this problem. It uses short, clear, and easy sentences. 

In a room full of people with different IQ levels and backgrounds, if even the person with the lowest level of understanding can grasp the message, then the communication has truly succeeded. To me, plain language is not about making ideas smaller. It is about making ideas reachable.

Since when have you been practising plain language? What motivated you to do so? And what, if any, were the benefits? 

I have been practising plain language for many years, though I may not have formally called it so in the beginning. During my career in regulation and supervision, I discovered that many non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and banks were not able to comply with RBI instructions, not because they did not want to comply, but because they failed to properly understand the circulars. The language was often technical, lengthy, and difficult to interpret. For fear of making mistakes, many institutions gave vague or incomplete replies.

I also noticed that even many junior colleagues within the system were struggling to understand the language and process cases correctly. This made me realise that complexity in communication was itself becoming a barrier to effective regulation and compliance.

One incident particularly influenced me. A large number of compliances in a bank had remained pending for months, some even for more than six months. I called the compliance officers from different divisions of the bank and explained in simple language what exactly was required. The results were remarkable. Most of the pending compliances were completed within two weeks.

After that, I also started “train the trainer” sessions so that understanding would not remain limited to a few individuals. The idea was to create institutional memory so that compliance culture could continue smoothly in the future as well. This experience convinced me that plain language is not merely about simplification. It improves understanding, reduces fear, strengthens compliance, and builds confidence.

Do you think plain language is only for the layperson? Please elaborate on your answer. 

No, not at all. Even highly educated people such as doctors, engineers, business persons, and professors often struggle to understand complicated legal language. They may know English very well, but when it comes to interpreting legal documents, agreements, insurance policies, or loan papers, many still seek professional help. In fact, lawyers sometimes differ in interpreting the same law or document. This shows that the problem is not education alone. The real problem is the complexity of the language used. 

Plain language helps everyone. It makes communication clear, reduces confusion, and lowers the chance of misunderstanding. A document should communicate its meaning directly, instead of forcing people to depend on experts to understand what is written.

You have worked with the RBI, the government, and with international agencies. How would you rate their openness to plain language? 

In my experience, RBI circulars and regulatory documents are often difficult to understand, even for many employees, bankers, and officials of NBFCs. The language is usually technical, lengthy, and written with great caution to avoid legal and regulatory risks. Because of this, many regulated entities sometimes fail to understand the exact requirement and may not be able to comply. 

The situation is similar with many international agencies. In fact, they are often even more conservative in their drafting style. They try to protect themselves from legal, reputational, and policy risks. As a result, the language becomes highly formal and complex. However, I feel that awareness is now growing about the importance of plain language. Regulators and institutions are slowly realising that communication becomes more effective when people can clearly understand what is expected from them.

Why do citizens need to know what the RBI does? What does its balance sheet hold for citizens? 

Most people think RBI is only for bankers or economists. But RBI affects the daily life of every citizen. 

When prices rise too fast, RBI tries to control inflation (see my explanatory article here). When you take a home loan, vehicle loan, or fixed deposit, RBI policies affect the interest rate. When you use Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and money reaches instantly, RBI is working silently in the background. When a bank faces trouble and people still trust the banking system, that confidence comes largely because RBI supervises banks.

You only notice the electricity supply when it’s missing. Similarly, most people notice RBI only when there is inflation, banking stress, cash shortage, or payment failure.

Citizens should get to know the RBI because RBI protects the value of money, stability of banks, and trust in the financial system.

RBI’s balance sheet is not just an accounting statement (see my explanatory article here). It reflects the financial strength of the country’s central bank. It contains information on assets such as gold, foreign exchange reserves, and government securities. These act like safety cushions for the country. During difficult times like COVID, global crisis, or sudden financial panic, these assets help RBI support banks, manage liquidity, and maintain confidence in the economy. 

Like a family feels secure when savings are available during bad times, similarly, the country feels secure when RBI has strong reserves and a strong balance sheet. In short, RBI’s balance sheet assures people that:

• currency will remain trusted,
• banks will remain stable,
• digital payments will continue smoothly,
• and the economy can handle shocks.

What are your personal interests and passions? 

My personal interests revolve around learning, communication, and helping people grow. I am also passionate about emotional intelligence, mentoring, and public speaking, as they help people understand themselves and connect better with others.

I enjoy reading extensively and try to finish four books every month, though I must honestly admit I succeed only sometimes. I also enjoy writing books and articles, especially on finance, leadership, mindfulness, and human behaviour. 

Apart from this, music is very close to my heart. I enjoy playing musical instruments and often sing to myself. It helps me relax, reflect, and stay emotionally balanced. 

ISO science writing standard, Zen Citizen, DeisgnThings, my webinar

Read the June edition of my newsletter Clear Enough here.  

Zen Citizen: An effort towards clearer, bribe-free government processes

 

Last month I wrote about my volunteering project with Zen Citizen on translating the death registration form into plain English. This form gave me a chance to work closely with the founder of Zen Citizen, Vineeta Kommineni. Today's post features Vineeta and her organization and takes a look at their work from a plain language perspective. 

Founded close to two years ago, Zen Citizen is a volunteer-driven initiative that explains procedures in simple language and shares hacks/workarounds and undocumented information to help citizens independently apply for services. 

When Vineeta’s father passed away, she visited government offices many times to get documentation done. Each time she would be turned away by the staff asking for some or the other missing detail or document. The intent was clear: to wear her out enough to push her into paying a bribe. 

It didn’t really work that way. Eventually, Zen Citizen happened. While the core idea behind Zen Citizen is to empower citizens to access government services easily and on their own, the deeper goal is to fight against corruption, Vineeta told me in a telephonic interview. 

“Why should a citizen take the help of even middlemen to exercise their rights? Often the middlemen’s fee covers the bribe,” Vineeta said. 

The struggle for information is real in India. Finding out the police station, revenue district, or municipal ward your house is a part of should be just a few clicks away in this day and age. But it isn’t. One of Zen Citizen’s initial projects, Civic Compass, solved this for the residents of Bengaluru.  

Other tools Vineeta’s team have built are Kaveri Village Finder that helps you locate your property within the revenue department’s maps and Kaveri Image Resizer, a nifty way to resize photos for marriage certificate applications. These tools are workarounds for buggy government websites that frustrate and slow down users. 

Plain language in Zen Citizen’s work

“It isn’t enough to say file an affidavit. It needs to be explained in plain language. And in the absence of such information, Zen Citizen comes in. What’re the different ways in which something can be misunderstood? We must look at all that.

“Writing in plain language is not difficult. The hard part is caring enough about the user to do it,” Vineeta said.

Her current work with Seva Sindhu is to translate government forms into plain English. It’s a portal that hundreds of thousands of people visit everyday to avail of services such as birth or death certificate, police verification certificate, bus passes, and so on. “We are currently working only on the text and not doing any changes in the backend or redesigning the UX as that’s a safe, low-friction place to begin,” she informed me.

But plain language often goes deeper than text: it is about design and, as earlier noted, about empathy – aka getting into the user’s shoes. So I asked Vineeta what her approach would be if a change needs to go deeper than the text level. Take, for instance, the language field in the death registration form. Getting clarity on how to fill this field is not simply about editing the text or providing an explanatory note – see my post on this last month. This one field is enough to show that the form was not designed in a user-first way. 

To this, Vineeta replied, “We started with writing guides to help citizens navigate dysfunctional systems with less frustration. Our goal was to make the best of the situation. We did not want to fight the system or try to convince the government to change its processes—that felt like a battle for another day.” 

Fair enough. One must choose their battles and Zen Citizen has chosen theirs. Plain language is, of course, central to any work that strives to bring clarity to government processes. One does start with the text, but usually the work grows beyond it.

Translating the death registration form into plain English

 

I worked on the death registration form as a volunteer for Zen Citizen. I'd have liked to use some screenshots but the login is very buggy and I could not get into the Seva Sindhu portal once I completed the project. So, here’re some text-only highlights: 

Preferred language: This is a field at the beginning of the form. At first, it seems like an innocent enough query. But look at it more deeply and it can unhinge the entire form. By preferred language, what is the government asking? Is it the preferred language in which I want to fill the form? Or, is it the preferred language in which I want the Death Registration certificate to be provided? 

I selected English and proceeded to the subsequent fields. However, the language preference continued to haunt me. Further below in the form, it asks for the deceased’s name in Kannada. This on an English form. What happens if I am not a Kannada-speaking person? Of course, you can always use transliterating tools to input the name in Kannada, but how do I verify if it’s a correct reproduction of my name? 

The converse is even more problematic: that is, being asked to type the name in English when I have chosen Kannada as my language for the form. In English, one’s name can be spelled in so many ways. How do you verify if it’s correct if you don’t know English? This can result in a critical failure because if the certificate spells your name wrong, it’s a dud. None of the government agencies will accept it and getting it corrected is a lifetime’s work. 

Ration card: The form assumes everyone has a ration card! How did this come to be? If you don’t have a ration card, you cannot even begin with the form as the name of the deceased is automatically populated from the ration card. 

Date & time of death: The time selection menu progresses by the minute. This can be very tedious to navigate to the exact hour and minute. Providing a time selection menu like we use to set alarms in mobile phones shouldn’t be too difficult. The other question is why the time of death is relevant, unless we are investigating homicide. 

We also looked at the necessity of some of the data being collected – like the age of the deceased’s spouse. We are waiting to hear from Seva Sindhu on this and other queries. 

My learnings from this project as of now

• The form is not designed from the user’s perspective. It seems to primarily solve things for the government agency rather than the citizen.  
• It works on many assumptions -- that someone typing in English also knows how to type their name in Kannada; that everyone has a ration card; that if they cannot figure out something, they can always avail the services of a broker. 
• The form does not seem to be tested with users. Else, some of the things I highlighted here may have caught the eye of the form creators. 
• The form does not seem to take into cognizance the varied background of the users. Given that it’s a death registration form, it is applicable to everyone (!) and hence must be usable by everyone. 

The lacunae of this form are not unique to it. God knows, there are worse government forms out there. It is representative though and makes for a good beginning. Hope to be able to report positively on this project in the days to come. 

DPDP: It’s all about consent (and clarity)

 

Last month I wrote on the blog that in India we seem to be waiting for plain language to be made a compliance requirement. I couldn’t have spoken sooner. 

The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act [pdf] lays down the rules for collection, storage, and use of personal data online. A rule under this Act requires companies to collect informed consent from their users on the data they collect and be clear about the exact purpose they are going to use it for. 

And guess what? They need to ask for consent in plain language.

“Every request for consent under the provisions of this Act or the rules made thereunder  (sic) shall be presented to the Data Principal in a clear and plain language, …” [Emphasis mine.]

(Data principal here means the person who owns the data.)

The DPDP Act is largely inspired by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), though it is different in some respects, too. However, both require plain language. Here’s what the GDPR says:

“Requests for consent must be ‘clearly distinguishable from the other matters’ and presented in ‘clear and plain language’.”     

Are Indian companies equipped to create a plain language consent form? 

No. And neither are they equipped to comply with most of the Act. DPDP has fundamentally questioned the way Indian companies do business. Most of them simply do not bother about privacy. And now they are being asked to obtain consent that is “free, specific, informed, unconditional, with a clear affirmative action”. That’s a big ask. 

The Act also lets the data principal withdraw consent at any time, after which the companies can no longer use or store their data. All of this must be complied within May 2027. As one can imagine, companies are scrambling to meet the deadline. 

So my guess is that no one is bothered much about drafting a plain language consent form. I’d be happy to be proved wrong. 

None of the news articles and blog posts I skimmed mention the term “plain language”. They do talk about clarity in the consent form. But how will companies go about achieving clarity without being aware of plain language guidelines is anybody’s guess. And, if their consent forms are not in plain language, they cannot be in true compliance of the law. 

It doesn’t help that the Act itself is not in plain language. That’s a missed chance to set an example. However, some wins are that it provides helpful snippets in the margins which highlight important parts of the Act (see screenshot below). 

 It also talks about different use cases where it becomes applicable. This makes it easy to understand.  

Overall, I would celebrate the fact that India’s new digital privacy act demands clarity and actually mentions plain language, not to forget its pathbreaking use of “she” and “her".  But we need to keep moving ahead.

(Pic credit: Pexels, Mohammed Yasir https://www.pexels.com/@mohammad-yasir-3365802/.)

A (somewhat) plainspeaking Indian bank, standards update, PLAIN webinar..

 Read the third edition of Clear Enough here. 

Think Indian corporates don’t care about plain language? Think again

When I talk about plain language in India, some of the questions I am asked are: Who practises it in India? Do Indians really care about plain language? This line of questioning seems to assume that plain language is a niche cause and isn’t of much relevance to most people.

Today I have some evidence to show that plain language is indeed practised in India, and no less by ICICI Bank, one of the top private sector banks. But there’s a catch. We’ll come to that.

Take a look at the Bank’s terms and conditions for Indian users. You’ll find:

• The very familiar legalese such as repugnant, thereof, and more;
• Lots of nominalizations such as “by giving a written notice”, “during which any maintenance work or repair is required to be carried out”, “Customers can make financial transactions”;
• Even gendered pronouns (from which century is this text?!); 
• No proofreading: “external service provider,s or agent's”.

No surprises here.

The readability statistics of this document as measured by Microsoft Word:

Words per sentence: 37.2

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 19.6

Passive sentences: 32%

Now take a look at the Bank’s privacy notice for EU users. The familiar legalese is missing and you do a double take: Is this the same company?

“We” and “you” are used plentifully. So are tables and vertical lists, though the numbering is a bit off in places. Note how these are missing from the India terms.

Of course, it could be plainer.

Example 1:

Original:

“We are permitted to process your personal data in compliance with Data Protection Legislation by relying on one or more of the following lawful grounds”

Plain language rewrite:

“The Data Protection Legislation permits us to process your personal data on these grounds”

Example 2:

Original:

The processing is necessary for the purposes of a legitimate interest pursued by us, which might be:

1. to provide services to you;
2. to ensure that our customer accounts are well-managed;
3. to prevent, detect, investigate and prosecute…

Plain language rewrite:

The processing is necessary to:

1. provide services to you;
2. ensure that your account is well-managed;
3. to prevent, detect, investigate and prosecute…

The document could be clearer in more ways. But the point is that it is head and shoulders above the terms document for India.

Its readability statistics as measured by Microsoft Word:

Words per sentence: 23.9

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 14

Passive sentences: 18.4%

Do note that I have used the readability statistics simply to provide a broad comparison between the two documents. Readability tools cannot accurately assess clarity.

Obviously, ICICI Bank can do a fairly good job of writing clearly when they put their mind to it. I’m guessing this is true of other Indian corporates as well.

So then why are Indian customers crammed with gobbledygook, while EU customers get clearer communication?

The answer is: regulation. Sometimes from within and sometimes without.

Led by central banks, many banks and financial organizations in Europe have consciously chosen plain language to bring about transparency, trust, and better customer experiences.

And this has not come about in a vacuum. Europe has had a long history of plain language, with many countries requiring it by law. In particular, regulations in the banking and finance sector require clarity, the latest among them being the EU Accessibility Directive. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority practises plain language and expects companies to follow suit.

In such a setting, ICICI Bank would rather not stick out with its thereofs and repugnants. I am not surprised. A few years ago when I came to know about the booming job scene for plain language summary writers in India, I was told that they were all writing for clients abroad.

To sum up, the question is not whether Indians care for plain language. It seems we are simply waiting for plain language to become a compliance requirement. That too may not be far, given the many developments that are afoot. But if you keep waiting for too long, you may have a tough time playing catch-up.

Transcript of my interview with Joe Kimble

I interviewed Joe Kimble, emeritus professor at Cooley Law School, for my article in Frontline magazine. Here's the lightly edited transcript.  

Vijayalaxmi Hegde (VH): The Bar Council of India (BCI) has announced that plain legal drafting will be introduced in the curriculum for a law degree. This announcement seems to have taken lawyers, senior advocates, and law students by surprise. Many people have not heard about it. It's just sort of out of the blue you know, because we haven't had what we could call a journey towards plain language in India. In recent years there have been some calls for plain language from judges of the Supreme Court, too. There has been push back against those long rambling judgments which no one can understand. When I posted about the BCI on LinkedIn, someone asked if the ISO standard had got anything to do with this. I don't know. I'm not sure. 

Joe Kimble (JK): The question is whether you have the people in place who can teach plain drafting. You know it's a special skill drafting. Most lawyers even in the United States don't have that skill. So, you've got to make sure that your professors have learned that skill or are willing to learn that skill, right? 

Joe Kimble
Pic credit: Cooley Law School

I mean, there's no point obviously in saying we need to teach plain drafting if there's nobody around who knows how to do it, right? 

VH: There may be just a smattering of people all over India who are conversant with plain legal writing. So that's not enough. 

JK: I think all the legal writing teachers in the US would teach clear writing, clear communication. All of them emphasize the importance of clearly communicating with your audience. Whether they would call it plain language or not is another story. They might not talk in those terms but in effect they are teaching the principles of plain language. 

VH: You said on the I-GL podcast that legal texts have readers too. And legal texts need to be edited and critiqued. You know, I was a journalist when I started out. When we would get any legal copy, it’s as if it would be set in stone. It would come with a disclaimer like, “Don't touch the legal stuff.” So it is untouchable, you know, in India. Your life's work has been about breaking this down, right? This aura around legal text. It is just text. It can and should be edited and clarified. 

JK: Well, once a statute is passed it becomes a law or a regulation. And it is set in stone. I mean there's nothing you can do about it once it is enacted. But the job is to get to the drafters to draft in a way that is obscure. It is hard for the average citizen to understand. Some drafters are quite good at that and others are not quite as good. There's great variability in the quality of all legal writing in the United States. It varies from state to state on whether the drafters are good, up to speed on plain language and clear communication. Same thing at the federal level. Now, sometimes to be fair to drafters, they don't have a free hand. Lobbyists and other special interest groups will come in and say, “This is what we need.” they'll just hand it off to the legislature and say this is what we want and don't change a word." So, a lot of times to be fair again to drafters, they will not have a free hand. 

But when they do have a free hand, they ought to apply the various kinds of techniques that Bryan Garner and I talk about in our book. And there're [other] books out there on how to do this. Ours just happens to be free. So you've got a great start on on techniques. I'm promoting my own book a little bit here, but I don't think there's any book out there that goes into such detail on drafting, pure drafting technique. In other words, you will hear it said, “Write short sentences.” Well, okay. That's one thing to say you should do that. But how do you do that? In the book we show ways to do that. And we've got maybe six or seven different ways to do that. That's just about drafting technique. 

Now those techniques ought to be applicable in any drafting office. Any drafting office ought to be able to use those techniques to improve the quality of their drafting. So, there are resources out there that conscientious drafters, drafters that care enough to be clear, can find and use. You have to want to do it. You have to care enough. 

I think it's a very positive development with the BCI. Sometimes pressure has to come from the from the top. It can only be a good thing and it may just give your your law school teachers, professors just a little bit of a nudge in that direction. Just the fact that it's in the air, that it's in the conversation is a good thing. 

But you have to have people that know how to do it. If you're going to teach, you got to know how to teach. Yeah, you need to know your stuff. 

VH:  You spoke about drafters being so much under pressure. But you know if the intention is there, there can be various workarounds like a plain language version of the law. And you present it as well. So we might be trying to please everyone with such a move but at least there is a plain language version of the law if someone wants to read and understand. 

JK: Ideally you wouldn't have to do that. It would be clear enough to begin with. It also adds another level of work that the drafters have to do if they have to prepare a plain language synopsis, right? But it doesn't seem like it would be terribly burdensome after you have written it to draft a summary. My attitude is anything that works, anything that makes it easier for the public to understand the laws that govern their lives should be – nothing should be off the table. Every resource that you think you can bring to bear on making laws and regulations and codes and rules clear is a good thing. 

VH: There is no drafting pressure on consumer contracts, right? The companies can do it. The lawyers who work for these companies, they could do it. Do you think we could get better traction there initially than legislative texts maybe?

JK: Boy, I don't know. It's very hard to move large law firms because as you say there is no pressure on them to to to do better. I suspect that most of their contracts are still pretty bad. I think you're likely to have more luck with legislative drafters, frankly, than with big law firms. Large law firms are just so set in their ways. They're so paranoid about missing some little tiny detail that might come back to haunt them somewhere down the road. And they obviously don't want to let their clients down. They think they've got to protect themselves. 

Training would help, you know. I've done quite a bit of training for law firms. I don't do as much as I used to. And of course, Bryan Garner does a lot of training for law firms. So there's interest out there. But the problem is so huge. 

VH: I've been reading your book Essentials for Drafting Clear Legal Rules [pdf]. You list four basic principles at the start of the book. When I read this, and I'm not a lawyer, my takeaway was that so this is what I would be doing if I would be doing plain language writing in any domain. I mean in spirit the main guidelines remain the same. 

JK: Yes, you're right that many of the techniques we set out in the book will apply not only to drafting but also to other forms of legal writing like court papers. Now they all have their models. The big divide is between analytical writing and persuasive writing on the one hand and drafting on the other which has to be neutral. There's no analytical content to legal drafting. It just sets out rights and duties. But analytical writing in court papers, you're taking a position, right, for one side and you're advocating for one side or the other. So there will be techniques that come into play in analytical writing that don't come into play in legal drafting. Different kinds of formatting requirements. You're trying to make a persuasive case. I don't want to say emotional content, but there's argumentative content. Legal drafting doesn't have that. With drafting, you're just setting out rights and duties. So, but having said that, there's no reason that some of the techniques for shortening sentences, avoiding wordiness, such as use of headings and subheadings and vertical lists couldn't be used in court papers as well. So there is some overlap. There're also distinct parts to both of them. 

VH: There's so much referencing going on in legal writing, right? It always keeps referring back to some clause somewhere. There's no easy reference provided right there like even a summarisation of what that reference is leading to. It just seems very inconsiderate to the reader. And that reader need not be a lay person. That reader can be a lawyer, too. 

JK: You're talking now about analytical writing. In a court paper you have to start out with what the law is and how court cases have interpreted it. So, you do have to make these references. But they don't have to clog up the text. You can make these references in footnotes, which is something that Bryan Garner has advocated for a long time. I agree with him on that. There's a way to handle this by putting what I would call bibliographic information. You can say in the leading case of Smith v Kimble. Well, in the text you don't have to include all of those numbers. 138 United States Report 200 and the year and the court. You can drop all of that information in a footnote. You don't have to clutter up the text with those legal references. Now, that is something that US lawyers do not do. They have resisted that. They want all of that information up in the text and it really clutters up the text. 

But a good writer will know how to do that in a way that doesn't require the reader to constantly look up and down. If the reader knows that the only thing that's in the footnote is the citation or the bibliographic information on where I want to find that case, I have to go to this volume and that's all that needs to be in the footnote. 

VH; You mentioned [about guidelines on] cutting down verbosity in your book. But plain language is not just about cutting down words, right. Because sometimes shorter may not be clear. Do you want to comment on that? 

JK: Sometimes shorter may not be clear. True. Sometimes you need to provide a little bit of an explanation for a consumer. What is a “default judgment” after all? If somebody gets a paper in the mail or delivered to their door that says if you don't do this in 30 days, the court will enter a default judgment. Well, what does that mean? Basically, it means you're going to lose the case. And the other side will get whatever they want, whatever they've asked for. 

So there are times when you need to provide a little extra detail. We found this in redrafting all of the federal rules. Although in places you may be adding a little explanation or a definition, it will be offset by the savings you made if you write in plain language. 

I've never yet been involved in a plain language project that didn't come out shorter than it started out. Even though there may be places where you had to add some words. Even the design might have ended up in longer documents, but you know more accessible documents. 

VH: And that brings me to the question: if we're talking about plain language drafting, then should we also be talking about plain legal design? Do you think one can be taught without teaching the other? 

JK: Well, I think ideally you would teach legal design. Some people are taking this legal design quite a ways down the road. They're including icons and pictographs: people shaking hands after the deal is settled. 

VH: Graphic contracts. 

JK: Yes. So, anything that we can do to make it clearer is a good idea. I'm not an expert on legal design, but there are some obvious things that drafters can do, which is to use more white space, more headings, more vertical lists. Better spacing between the lines. If you only single space your documents, it's going to look intimidating. You need more a little more line spacing. Margins that are 1.25 inches or something like that. A readable font and a readable font size. So those are just basic design elements that any lawyer ought to be able to put in place. Now if you get into creating sidebars and pictures and flowcharts those are all good things but of course those take more skill and time. 

You can even improve on the headings. That's one of the point we make in the book that headings don't have to be short. There's this idea out there that in legal drafting all the headings should just be kind of short little snippets. But there's nothing wrong with a long heading or a longish heading. A heading that really accurately describes what that provision contains. 

I was just reviewing something the other day where people had five or six provisions in a row. I said to myself if they had tried to put headings on these provisions they would not have been able to because it's not coherent. If they had tried to say this little piece is about this and this little piece is about that, they wouldn't have been able to do it because they overlapped too much or they conflicted too much. So the headings serve as a check on the organization of things. And if you can't assign good headings and subheadings, there's something wrong with your organization to begin with. If the headings won't work, it doesn't fit together. 

It sounds like you have a challenging task in India. Getting lawyers to accept plain language is a challenge. We've been working at it for 40 years. I don't know how much progress we made. We made some progress but it is very incremental. This change is not going to happen in my lifetime. It's going to happen gradually slowly over time like with the Bar Council. 

VH: But that's because of the kind of work that people like you have done. I like to believe that we enjoy the ripple effects of the work that you and other plain language leaders have put in over the years. Thank you so much for your time. 

JK: My pleasure and keep on pitching. 

Martin Cutts, towards an Indian standard, and listening to Annetta Cheek

Read the second edition of Clear Enough here, India's only newsletter on plain language. And hit subscribe! 

Plain language starts with intention

When you wish to inform, communicating clearly to the reader comes relatively easily. You will try and provide all the required information or point the reader to where they can find it.

The reverse is also true. That is, when you do not wish to inform, you will not speak clearly. You will not point out helpful resources. You will write words and sentences that mean nothing, are not relevant to the reader, or at worst can mislead the reader.

Let me explain with two examples.

Exhibit A
A researcher approached the National Archives to request for some records. The National Archives told the researcher, “Research facilities are available for researchers subject to fulfillment of certain conditions as specified in the guidelines uploaded on our official website www.nationalarchives.in under the head, ‘what’s new’.”

The communication from the Archives failed because of two reasons:
1. It could have listed the conditions outright instead of sending the researcher on a wild goose chase.

2. Or, it could have pointed out the exact location on the website to the researcher. Not done either. (I visited the website but could not find the What’s New section. No wonder the researcher got frustrated.)

It also didn’t help that the entire communication was in officialese. When the Central Information Commission asked the Archives to communicate in "simple, clear language", I couldn’t help but wonder how this could happen when the context for clarity was missing. Government communication frequently tends to speak down and confuse. It is not the ecosystem for clear words and sentences.

Exhibit B
The Supreme Court recently pulled up legal firms for drafting confusing clauses. Clause 13 of an agreement said that the arbitration venue would be New Delhi, while Clause 14 said that Jaipur courts would have exclusive jurisdiction.

Seriously? I am surprised that the apex court of this land has to deal with such drivel.

Chief Justice Surya Kant exclaimed, “Why can't you simplify the clause when you enter into [an] agreement ...?”

In both these examples, the very intention to communicate and inform is missing. When this is so, it is a given that language will mirror the intention and be as confusing and intimidating as it can be.

Clear Enough -- First edition!

Hello and welcome to the first edition of Clear Enough, India's only newsletter on all things plain language! I am excited and nervous for the same reason: I've never had a newsletter of my own before, much less on plain language! So bear with me as I unpack this edition.

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Why India's Legal System May Finally Be Moving Beyond Legalese

I am linking here to my article published in the Frontline magazine on the Bar Council of India's move to include plain language drafting in law school curriculum. This is an important step towards clarity and I dare say it's an important article, too. It sums up the plain language journey so far in India and discusses the challenges to plain language drafting and the way ahead. 

I spoke to Joe Kimble for this article -- thank you, Joe! I also thank the other interviewees, Kishore Pariyar and Rohit Sharma.  

The article is paywalled. If you'd like to read it, please get in touch using the contact form on the right and I'll send you a copy. 

Plain language guideline 4: Using vigorous verbs

One of the beauties of the English language is its ability to transform most nouns into verbs. These noun-turned-verbs are vigorous and can bring the text alive. It is also equally true that one of the ways to write poorly is to do just the opposite: make nouns of perfectly sound verbs. 

Here’s an example from Martin Cutts’ Oxford Guide to Plain English: 

“The team’s role is to perform problem definition and resolution.”

The writer created nouns from the verbs define and resolve. If these were to revert to their verb forms, the sentence could read thus:

“The team’s role is to define and resolve problems.”

Apart from flowing well, sentences are shorter when verbs are used as verbs --  nine words in the rewrite versus 10 in the original. Yes, that’s just one word less, but visually it makes a huge difference when you drop all the “ition”s. 

In Indian languages, though, it doesn’t sound odd if you were to nominalize – the tendency to noun-ify the verbs. In fact, it’s inherent in all Indian languages. 

Jyoti Sanyal, the author of Indlish and the pioneer of plain language in India, intimately understood these mannerisms and came up with the “mother tongue, other tongue” approach to help Indians communicate better in English. He said, “Consider the expression: ‘His mother still mothers him.’ It would be impossible to render that expression into any Indian language with such economy. Indian languages operate on the noun. The noun is retained rigidly as a noun, and a do/doing word is placed after it to arrive at action.”

The bane of most legal, academic, and, in India even journalistic writing, seems to be this systematic weakening of verbs. Instead, let verbs be. If possible, create a verb from a noun and enliven your text. Nominalization can end up in noun strings that only serve to muddle the reader or put them to sleep.

Pic credit: Photo by Mo Saeed: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sporty-female-playing-tennis-on-court-5409085/