When it comes to legal text, the technical writer’s first rule is simple:
Do not change any text that a lawyer wrote.
There are legal reasons why disclaimers, copyright notices, privacy policies, and other examples of fine print were phrased the way they were. Under no circumstances do you “clean them up” after the lawyers are done. No revisions.
Your superpower is communication. Theirs is the law. Law trumps communication.
The technical writer’s second rule of legal text is a lot less intuitive:
Push back on the lawyers if their writing is poor.
I know that it’s no fun; you still have to do it.
One of my maxims is that any company that allows the lawyers, the accountants, or the human resources minions to run the company has lost its way. You should for sure listen to policy advice from these experts, but you don’t hand them the keys to the C-suite.
Regardless of who is to blame, I heard a disclaimer in a radio ad that made me want to weep.
Visit [URL] for Ts & Cs. Nineteen-plus to wager. [Province] only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact [a provincially funded help line] at 1-866-[xxx-xxxx] to speak to an advisor free of charge. [URL] operates pursuant to an operating agreement with [a subsidiary of a provincial ministry].
You can tell that lawyers wrote at least one draft of this mess; no one else uses the word “pursuant” except cruciverbalists (crossword-puzzle setters).
First, the disclaimer refers to “Ts & Cs.” I think it’s great that either lawyers and/or copywriters have internal shorthand for “terms and conditions.” I also think it’s witless that they were so used to their shorthand that they assumed that “everyone knows that!” Even though marketing is worried about the duration of a radio advert and therefore eager to shave seconds off, shaving seconds at the cost of confusing or alienating listeners seems like a poor trade-off.
Second, the disclaimer counsels you on how to proceed if you have “questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you.” Okay, well, I have both questions and concerns about that weirdo who stands way too close to me on the bus and who imitates a baby panda the whole trip. But I don’t think that those concerns justify phoning a toll-free number that helps people with an addictive personality disorder.
As opposed to “your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you.” Those three words change the sentence a lot. If you don’t know what an antecedent is and how it affects clarity, find someone who does. It’s embarrassing that that mess made it to air.
Why didn’t anyone spot the grammatical ambiguity? Neither lawyers nor marketing people are experts in the English language, the way we are. Lawyers may be experts in ambiguity in legal language. That’s not even close to the same thing.
(And based on a lawyer acquaintance who had to tell her own lawyer that the legal language in a PoA [power of attorney] was ambiguous, not all lawyers are experts in the practical implications of legal language.)
Throughout your career as a technical writer, you might not work a lot with legal texts. But the lesson applies to other experts and it’s up to you to keep the in-house shorthand out of documentation that users will read.
You are the expert. Stand up for your project, your profession, and yourself.