Unwelcome messages come into our lives in strange ways. In Carver's story, the narrator just doesn't want to know that his wife is leaving him, but her list of grievances comes with an inexorable finality. Similarly, a parking ticket, or a law requiring me to pay a parking fine, is not any more well received because I can understand it clearly. It slips past our defences like an envelope under a door. The law imposes itself despite our will, and irrespective of how efficiently it communicates.

The words travel from the public into the private sphere, from the shared space of the passage outside the door into the private space of the narrator's study. Legislation must make the same journey from the public halls of parliament into the intimacy of my den at home. Public laws are not private letters, no matter how similarly their language may be rendered.

The narrator experiences the language of the letter as merely FEIGNING intimacy. When drafting legislation, I do my best to address the future users of the statute as directly as possible with text pitched at what I take to be their level of understanding. I do so by feigning intimacy with my reader. I pretend that my public Bill is actually written with her specifically in mind. I "write my reader's name on the envelope" in the terms of Carver's story. Carver's narrator senses that he is being duped; this apparently private, personal communication is experienced as a disturbingly foreign, pronouncement: "the charges were outrageous and out of keeping with my wife's character". It is my contention that plain language legislation aspires to a mythical model of transparent, private conveyance of the law from the State to the citizen. An instrumental myth, certainly, that has supported worthwhile reforms in legislative language. But still a myth.