Saunders Robinson Brown
Sentence from Agreement for sale and purchase of land
Finalist: Best Plain English Sentence Transformation
Judges' comment
The original sentence is a 176-word monster, loaded with legalese and unnecessary redundancy. The reduction to only 69 words is very welcome. If you count each of your bulleted items as a sentence, then you have an average sentence length of around 15 words—a major improvement. Well done. Good work on choosing an open, bulleted structure to increase clarity and understanding, and using a sentence stem that starts in the active voice.
The simpler vocabulary style of the revision is a vast improvement on the original. Gone are the legalese, redundancy, and doublets and triplets of legal writing. Instead, we have people acting and taking responsibility for their actions. An excellent translation.
There’s really only one idea here. It’s a complex idea covering various related areas, but you’ve explained it cleanly and clearly. This rewrite was among the best we saw. It takes a very long and complex sentence and creates something clear and easily understood, which captures everything and omits nothing.
Media statement
Saunders Robinson Brown is a medium-sized South Island law firm with offices in Christchurch and Rangiora. In 2009 we resolved to adopt the use of plain English in both our legal precedent documents and client dealings.
Since then we have progressively updated our firm precedents, and also applied plain English principles to new documents entering our precedent system.
In addition, the firm has introduced plain English drafting classes for graduates and new staff members, so as to maintain the plain English philosophy, firm-wide.
We sincerely thank the WriteMark Plain English Awards Trust for the opportunity to participate in the 2015 Awards.