The medium is the message. "Most important, it was not my wife's handwriting". The narrator is not concerned with what is communicated in the letter. The charges may be outrageous; but they may as well be completely justified. It is the performance of the letter that changes everything: the act of writing; the sliding of the letter under the door; the fact of the letter's having been written at all. Similarly, law is a performative utterance. To a drafter's dismay, a government is often only interested in the act of legislating itself, not in the precise messages so carefully crafted into the Bill. The significance of the distinction between a statement of policy and an Act of parliament is not lost on politicians, yet it is one that is sought to be elided in the advocacy of plain language for legislation.

1. Legislation as performance

One of the things that distinguishes legislation from other public documents is its self-performing character. If the law prohibits you from doing something, it doesn't need to persuade you that it's wrong, it just enacts the command "don't do it". A statute is a performative utterance: it has effect simply by being stated.

But plain language reforms tend to disguise this feature of the law. This is made particularly clear in the seminal plain language advocacy of the use of "must" to replace the use of "shall" in its directory sense.

In Australia, an exchange of views in the pages of the Australian Law Journal in 1989-90 was the harbinger of change. Professor Robert Eagleson and Ms Michele Asprey, in the long run, have now helped to convince almost every legislative counsel's office in the country to switch from "shall" to "must" in its command context, and to find other alternatives to "shall" in declaratory contexts (eg "The XYZ body is established by this section").