Skip to main content

The BUSKLAW July Newsletter: Addendum to the Moral Imperative of Plain Language: The Judeo-Christian Imperative


(Note: you may want to stop here if you aren't a spiritual person in the Judeo-Christian tradition.) 

As an introduction to this post, I'll share my religious background. I was brought up in the Protestant tradition with the Dutch Reformed twist. But when friends ask me what I really believe in, I hedge my bets based on:
  • I went to Hope College, affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. 
  • I went to Notre Dame Law School, a respected Catholic institution.
  • I'm a quarter Jewish and was cared for by a fairly authentic Jewish mom (who was thankfully tempered by my 100% Danish father). 
So at the pearly gates, I'll show Saint Peter (or whoever) the three Protestant-Catholic-Jew entry tickets reflecting this background, and hopefully one (or more) will allow passage. 

So now that I've disclosed my broad-minded belief system, here's my thesis: using plain language furthers the Christian and Jewish faiths. 

Contemporary Christian evangelist Rob Bell talks about ways in which Christians can echo Christ's resurrection in this video. At 2:02 in the piece, he describes that every "fair and honest act in business and trade...belong to God's good world." We've already seen how the twin evils of legalese and bureaucratese distort what is fair and honest in our society. So avoiding them furthers God's plans for his creation and enables us to advance to a higher state of awareness. 

On the Jewish side, many Jews practice tikkun olam (literally "repair of the world"), an aspiration to behave and act constructively and beneficially. As the Wiki states: "It's the idea that Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare but also for the welfare of society at large. To the ears of contemporary pluralistic Rabbis, the term connotes 'the establishment of Godly qualities throughout the world'." This goal is hardly different than what Rob Bell is talking about! Go figure. 

Regarding contract language, it's well-established that God and the Devil love contracts. We have God's contract with Abraham in the Old Testament, and the various contracts for souls proffered by the Devil. While the former is written in plain language, the latter assuredly is not, if only because it's impossible to cover all the loopholes of soul forfeiture, so the Devil uses obfuscation to hide that fact. 

What words flow from your keyboard, and how are they structured? Are you stuck in the mire of gobbledygook? Or is your business and legal writing clear and concise and so advances God's purpose in a small yet meaningful way?  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The BUSKLAW June Newsletter: Forcing Business Behavior Changes Through Buried Contract Provisions: Salesforce and Camping World

As reported by  The Washington Post , business-software giant Salesforce  recently instituted a policy barring its retailer customers from using its technology to sell semi-automatic weapons, including the AR-15 used in numerous mass shootings. One such customer is  Camping World , whose Gander Outdoors division sells many "AR" and other semi-automatic rifles .  Rather than approach Camping World/Gander, a "leading" Salesforce customer, and negotiating the termination of their semi-automatic rifle sales in exchange for some benefit (such as a software discount), Salesforce was tricky. They buried a provision barring the sale of semi-automatic rifles in the acceptable-use policy  ("AUP") binding on Camping World/Gander: Salesforce wants to force Camping World/Gander to make a major change to its business model via an addition to their AUP that is irrelevant to their customer's licensed use of Salesforce software. And although sneaky, I bet tha

The BUSKLAW Halloween 2022 Post: Stephen King's Asides on Poor Writing in Fairy Tale

  Having just read  Stephen King's Fairy Tale in time for Halloween, it's appropriate to examine his asides on poor writing included in the book. (BTW, Fairy Tale is a good read with King's typical well-executed character development, plot, and a great finish to the story. But you have like the whole Grimm fairy tale genre before you read his take on it.)  Stephen King doesn't tolerate anything less than crisp prose. When the story's hero, Charlie Reade, tries to read a book about the origins of fantasy and its place in the world matrix ("what a mouthful"), he can only scan it because: It was everything I hated about what I thought of as "hoity-toity" academic writing, full of five-dollar words and tortured syntax. Maybe that's intellectual laziness on my part, but maybe not. Later on, Charlie tries to focus on a particular chapter in the "origins of fantasy" book about the story of Jack and the Beanstalk but is put off by "t

The BUSKLAW April Newsletter: A Force Majeure Clause for the New Millennium

(Author’s Note: I originally wrote this post for Y2K, but I’ve updated it using plain English.  Happy April Fool’s Day 2016!)             A standard force majeure contract clause, where "Acts of God" excuse one party from performing their obligations without that non-performance being a breach of contract, are so 20th Century. So what if fire, flood, hurricane, snowstorm, or riot excuse contractual non-performance. Those events are too mundane to contemplate! Contract lawyers desperately need a force majeure clause for the clear and present dangers of the new(er) millennium! So, as a public service to the legal profession, I’ve assumed the heavy burden of drafting a "new age" force majeure clause for my colleagues to freely use: Either party's non-performance of this agreement will be excused to the extent that it is caused by the occurrence of any of the following events or circumstances: (i) Alien abduction, alien invasion, alien cerebral possession,