Plain Legal English From Rhetoric Perspective

Legal English is usually considered well-knit, inflexible, obscure and difficult to understand, for which it has been criticized for a long time. Therefore, over a long period of time, the appeal that legal English should be plainer and easier to comprehend has been emerging from all sides, from the governments to the public, from legal professionals to ordinary people. As a matter of fact, a so-called "Plain English Movement" has been developing for years in the world and it has various significant effects on English itself, of course, including legal English. The truth is that legal English, under the influence of the "Movement", has changed considerably and has become plainer in many aspects now, although it is really impossible for legal English to become as simple and casual as everyday English.As we all know, forensic linguistics is still a new subject. Although there have already been some studies on the subject of "Plain Legal English", most of them are general researches on macro level. It is out of question that the prospect of the study on "Plain Legal English" is very broad and there are still lots of things worth doing. The present essay, from the point-of-view of "legal rhetoric", analyzes and expounds the trend that legal English is to be plainer. Combining legal rhetoric with plain legal English in the study, the author tries to make his angle of view...