The first experiment used 35 persons called for jury duty in Maryland using 14 jury instructions taken from California's standard civil jury instructions. The purpose of the study was mainly to see if it was the complexity of the legal issues that made the instructions difficult or the difficulty of the language used. A group of attorneys were asked to rate the instructions according to their perceived complexity.

The experimenters tested each person individually by playing each instruction twice on a tape recorder. After hearing each instruction, the subject then verbally paraphrased the instruction, which was also recorded. The results showed, contrary to the attorneys' expectations, it was not the complexity of the ideas that caused problems in comprehension, but the difficulty of the language.

The second experiment used 48 persons chosen for jury duty in Maryland. For this experiment, they re-wrote the instructions, paying close attention to the legal constructions noted above. They divided the group into two. Using 28 original and modified instructions, they gave seven original instructions and seven modified instructions to each group. They used the same protocols in playing the instructions twice and asking the subjects to paraphrase them.

There was a significant improvement of the mean scores in comprehension in nine of the fourteen instructions. They concluded that the subjects understood the gist of the original only 45% of the time and the simpler ones 59% of the time.

This is not good enough, according to Professor Robert Benson (1984-85) of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He wrote, "...none of us would care to be tried by jurors who understood only 59% of their instructions."

Benson went on to say that the Charrows own data was leading them to a conclusion that they were unable to draw: that juries are never likely to understand oral instructions adequately. Elwork, Sales, and Alfini (1982) reach the same conclusion and recommend giving all jurors written as well as oral instructions.

To prove his point, Benson included three of the Charrows' re-written instructions in his own study on legal language using 90 law students and 100 non-lawyers. Using cloze tests, he found that, while the Charrows had reported 59% comprehension, the readers understood the written instructions almost fully (p. 546).

As to the claim that paraphrasing is better than other testing techniques, Benson claims that it has its own limitations, depending as it does on the subjects' ability to orally articulate what they understand. The Charrows had avoided asking the subjects to paraphrase in writing because "subject's writing skills would confound the results." Unfortunately, they ignored similar possible differences in their listening and their oral skills (Benson, p. 537).

The Charrows state that sentence length does not cause reading difficulty. "Although readability formulas are easy to use," they write, "and certainly do indicate the presence of lengthy sentences, they cannot be considered measures of comprehensibility. Linguistic research has shown that sentences of the same length may vary greatly in actual comprehensibility" (p. 1319).

Benson answered by writing that extremely long sentences such as those found in legal language are known to cause difficulty, probably because of memory constraints. He also found that the Charrows' revised instructions had actually shortened sentences by 35 percent. The shorter sentences "may well have played a role in improved comprehension" (pp. 552-553).