The Infinite Brief

According to the paper, published on SSRN (Social Science Research Network), the average readability level of the reviewed agreements was comparable to articles in academic journals.

Co-author Samuel Becher wrote, “While consumers are legally expected or presumed to read their contracts, businesses are not required to write readable ones.”

The study tested the documents using two well-established reading difficulty tests; the Flesch-Kincaid (F-K) test, which uses a formula to estimate the grade level required to understand the text, and the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) test, which places the average sentence length and number of syllables into a formula to develop a score from 1 to 100.