[dan-robertson]

If you’re writing for a very wide audience, many of whom may not have good literacy, then avoiding anything slightly complicated matters a lot. There are all sorts of words one often sees in documents from governments (and this article is from and for the us government) that are not suitable for wide audiences. For example:

- shall

- one as a pronoun

- whom (instead of “incorrectly” writing who)

- sentences with lots of clauses

- basically any uncommon word, especially a long word or one with an uncommon morphology that makes it hard to sound out

People with poor literacy will not be able to scan text and so every sentence and paragraph should be short and to the point (as it may be read in its entirety and if it is too long it will be skipped). I think something like 40% of the US has this level of literacy.

Incidentally, writing for an audience like this improves the efficiency and engagement of mere literate people too.

As an unrelated point: many legal phrases use both a Germanic and Romance word, eg assault and battery; breaking and entering

[cranekam]

Definitely agree here. In addition, I am reasonably literate and understand all the uncommon words people use instead of everyday ones but I find reading windy prose is tiring. "I purchased a house", "we utilized the spoon", "Steve and myself are going to the pub" all sound a lot more clumsy and showoff-y than "I bought a house", "we used the spoon", "Steve and I are going to the pub".

[smogcutter]

For what it’s worth, “Steve and myself are going to the pub” is flatly incorrect. Good rule of thumb is that if it you rewrite the sentence with just the pronoun and it sounds wrong, it’s wrong. “Myself is going to the pub” and throwing poor Steve in there doesn’t change that.

[cranekam]

Yeah, I know this one is incorrect. I wasn’t sure whether to include it or not but decided to because I think people generally say it for the same reason as the others: to sound fancy.