Common Contracts

The Law, The Musician, His Band and Their Partnership Agreement: Comprehensibility, Comprehension and Compliance in a Legal Text

January 13th, 2009

• Filed
  January 13th, 2009

This article performs a detailed forensic linguistic analysis of the specimen Partnership Agreement provided by the UK Musicians Union. Selected sections of the Agreement are assessed in terms of their comprehensibility (the degree to which properties of the document are understandable), comprehension (to what extent the reader understands the text) and compliance (how readily the reader acts in accordance with the text’s instructions), and are subsequently re-drafted in ‘plainer’ language. The study finds that the processes of comprehensibility, comprehension and compliance are themselves highly complex and that the communication between legal and lay parties is typically hindered not only by the language of the law itself, but also by the conflicting ideological systems associated with each sphere.