Lowering reading level did not change filing behaviour

The Legal Literacy programme's founding assumption is that plainer writing helps people act on legal information — finish a filing, meet a deadline, show up to a hearing. This note tests that assumption directly, and does not confirm it.

What we tested

Two versions of the same set of self-help filing instructions were distributed to visitors in two pilot counties: one written at a grade-twelve reading level (the version previously in use), and one rewritten at a grade-eight level by the same editorial process used platform-wide. Which version a visitor saw was assigned at random. We tracked whether the visitor went on to complete and file the relevant form within thirty days.

What we found

Filing completion rates between the two groups did not differ by a statistically meaningful margin: 31.2% for the grade-twelve group and 32.6% for the grade-eight group, within this sample's margin of error. Reading level, on its own, did not appear to change whether someone completed the filing.

What we did not find

This result does not show that plain language is useless, and it does not show that reading level cannot matter under different conditions. It shows that reading level alone, holding everything else about the instructions constant, was not the variable driving completion in this sample. Comprehension, time, access to a printer, cost of the filing fee, and confidence about what happens next all remained unmeasured in this study and any of them could be doing more work than reading level does.

Why we are publishing this

A finding that undercuts the assumption a whole programme is built on is exactly the kind of finding worth publishing, not burying. The Reading-Level Audit initiative is keeping its grade-eight target regardless of this result — plain language remains worth doing for readability's own sake — but this note means the institution can no longer claim, without evidence, that plain language alone moves people from reading to acting. The next study in this programme will test comprehension and confidence directly, rather than assuming reading level is a proxy for either.