Legislative drafters and other lawyers understandably take great comfort from using terms that have a well established meaning and which have also been reinforced by judicial interpretation. However, Butt & Castle fail to recognise the importance of this fact and dismiss it as a mere "notion".⁹ As so often recounted, Reed Dickerson¹⁰ once described ambiguity as "the most serious disease of language", and nowhere is the absence of this disease more important than in legislation. The avoidance of ambiguity is aided in a very significant way by the drafter's reliance on words which have a well established meaning.

Those who enthusiastically advocate the use of plain language in legislative drafting, make two serious assumptions and they use these assumption to justify the need for plain language.

3. Assumption: "Ordinary people have a desire to read legislation"

Public Readership Dimension
A primary feature of most materials which are identified as being suitable for plain language - is what I call the "public readership dimension". Books, leaflets, forms and documents are designed to communicate directly and convey information to members of the public - to be informative. However, absent from legislation is the public readership dimension. If it were shown that legislation was widely read by ordinary citizens, I have no doubt that the style of drafting would be altered so as to take account of that audience. However, in discussing plain language in legislative drafting, I fear that we are effectively talking in the dark. Those who advocate the use of plain language in legislative drafting are making one very large - and I say, unwise - assumption. That assumption is that members of the public are interested in reading raw legislation. However, this premise is less than well established. In the absence of substantive evidence that such public interest in legislation exists, I believe that the arguments in favour of plain language legislative drafting are very weak indeed.