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Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur begripligheten i Göta hovrätts domar förändrats mellan 2001 och 2021. Studien syftar till att undersöka dels hur syntax och lexikon förändrats i domarna, dels hur följsamheten till klarspråksråd har förändrats under perioden. Materialet består av totalt 18 domar från Göta hovrätt: tre brottmålsdomar och tre tvistemålsdomar vardera från 2001, 2011 och 2021. En kombination av kvantitativ och kvalitativ metod har använts i studien: I den kvantitativa analysen undersöktes syntax och lexikon i samtliga 18 domar och i den kvalitativa textanalysen användes klarspråkstestet för domar som verktyg för att analysera sex av domarna djupare. Resultatet visar att det skett förändringar i domspråket under den tid som undersökts, men att det inte är entydigt huruvida domarna har blivit mer begripliga eller ej. Den kvantitativa analysen visar att domarna i många avseenden ligger längre ifrån klarspråksidealet år 2021 än 2001 och 2011. Resultatet av den kvalitativa analysen visar dock att följsamheten till klarspråksråden förbättrats under den undersökta perioden. Facktermer rensas bort eller förklaras i större utsträckning, det juridiska språket närmar sig det vardagliga och tonen blir mer läsarvänlig. Den sammantagna slutsatsen blir därför att domarna i vissa avseenden blivit mer begripliga och närmat sig idealet, men att ytterligare förbättringar krävs för att de ska bli tillgängliga även för icke juridiskt kunniga läsare. / The purpose of this study is to examine how the comprehensibility of the judgments from Göta Court of Appeal has changed between 2001 and 2021. The study aims to examine how the syntax and terminology has changed within the judgments as well as how the compliance with Plain Language Guidelines has changed during this period. The material consists of 18 judgments from Göta Court of Appeal: three criminal convictions and three civil actions each from the years of 2001, 2011 and 2021.A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods has been used: In the quantitative analysis, syntax and terminology were examined in all eighteen judgments and for the qualitative analysis, Klarspråkstestet (“the plain language test”) was used as a mean to further analyze six of the judgments. The results show that the language has changed during the selected period, but it remains ambiguous whether the language has become more comprehensible or not. The quantitative analysis shows that the judgments lie further away from the Plain Language Ideal in 2021 than they did in 2001 and 2011. However, the results of the qualitative analysis show that the compliance with Plain Language Guidelines has improved during this period. Technical terms are removed or explained to a greater extent, the legalese is approaching the everyday language and the tone is becoming more reader friendly. The conclusion is therefore that in some respects, the judgments have become more comprehensible, but that further improvements are required to make them accessible for readers who do not have a clear understanding of judicial language.

Rezension zu Ursula Bredel, Christiane Maaß: Leichte Sprache. Theoretische Grundlagen. Orientierung für die Praxis. Dudenverlag. Bibliographisches Institut GmbH. Berlin. 2016. ISBN 978-3-411-91178-3

Today's technical communicators enjoy an increasingly broader role and influence in the workplace, and are often given latitude to use engaging rhetoric and personal touches in many kinds of communications. Historical documents, particularly those that are substantially removed from our own era, can offer fresh approaches and insight into the enduring elements of successful communication. This study explores the technical writings of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and considers their usefulness to professionals today. Although the political writing of Franklin and Jefferson is more familiar, both men frequently wrote about scientific and technical subjects and were well-known in their day for these documents. Franklin created a captivating persona and arguments which carried emotional and logical appeal. Jefferson was a student of ancient rhetoric and applied classical principles of arrangement to guide readers. His fondness for statistical records led to a skill in presenting numerical data and other types of information in creative, efficient ways. By using tone, language, and description, both Franklin and Jefferson created technical narratives that are equally informative and aesthetically pleasing. The contemporary era of technical communication has been shaped by positivism, the plain language movement, and humanism, among other significant trends. Franklin's and Jefferson's approaches to technical communication both support and challenge the guiding philosophies of these movements. Their styles are reviewed in this study against the context of modern approaches. Opportunities for further historical study are also offered, including additional writings of our Founding Fathers and technical writing from the turn of the twentieth century.

The purpose of this essay has been to study the comprehensibility and the plainness of chapter 1 and 2 in “Läroplan, examensmål och gymnasiegemensamma ämnen för gymnasieskola 2011” that is one of the governing documents of Swedish upper secondary school. The Swedish government approved a national language policy in 2005 which involved an aim that the official Swedish language would be refined, easy and comprehensible. Plain language has since the eighties had a prominent place in Swedish research and science and is now a thought-out principle at almost every public authority. This essay has performed a linguistic text analysis, a plain language analysis, a plain language test and a critical discourse analysis on the two chapters from “Läroplan, examensmål och gymnasiegemensamma ämnen för gymnasieskola 2011” that is common for all upper secondary school programs. The chapters are not written in plain language and the comprehensibility of the document is low. There is no usage of a personal pronoun which makes the text harder to read, there are plenty of words that are hard to understand or old-fashioned. The usage of technical terms is also a problem due to the fact that no additional explanations to the terms are being offered. All citizens in Sweden need to be able to read and understand the governing documents of school at some time in their life and it is therefore very disturbing that the document is written in such a way that only a few can read and understand the text in full. This also renders the implementation more difficult and the consequence might be that we have an education that is not equivalent for all. The non-usage of plain language also makes it easier for the elite and more difficult for the non-elite which could help increase the social rifts and bring us back to a class society with huge rifts between classes. The usage of plain language increases democracy and the trust in public authorities; it would therefore have been desirable that the “Läroplan, examensmål och gymnasiegemensamma ämnen för gymnasiskola 2011” had been written in plain language.

ClinicalTrials.gov is a database designed to help clinical researchers make their research publicly available. The clinical trials registered on the database each include a brief summary, which is meant to be a short description that the public can easily understand. In September 2022, ClinicalTrials.gov published a "Plain Language Checklist for Lay Brief Summaries" on their website, which identifies plain language best practices intended to help investigators craft summaries that can be readily understood by the public. This thesis assesses the impact of the checklist on the language use in the brief summaries in the year following the checklist's publication. The analysis examines 62 brief summaries for Phase III and IV clinical trials posted on ClinicalTrials.gov between September 26, 2022, and September 26, 2023. It focuses particularly on summaries associated with rheumatoid arthritis, knee replacement, and conjunctivitis to gauge how well they complied with 4 of the 19 criteria on the Plain Language Checklist: keeping sentences and paragraphs short, aiming for a 6th to 8th grade reading level, writing out acronyms on the first use, and providing both percentages and natural frequencies. It also examines rhetorical moves made in the summaries to address the use of jargon, key term definitions, headings, formatted lists, direct research questions, descriptions of study type, sentence fragments, and the placement of the purpose statement to see how these moves affected the plain language. Although the summaries tended to comply with the paragraph length guidelines, they did not comply with the sentence length, reading level, or acronym guidelines. The variation in compliance could be attributed to researchers' lack of awareness of the guidelines, lack of time to devote to creating brief summaries, or being too immersed in the field to imagine the needs of a lay audience. It could also be attributed to the National Institute of Health not enforcing the guidelines or to researchers not viewing the guidelines as being relevant.

Hypotheses on the efficiency of evidence-based printed materials can be directed by health communication concepts. These concepts can provide a general framework that goes beyond the traditional vulgarization point of view: instead, it points towards a strategy to obtain health outcomes and provoke behavior change, from a disease prevention, management and health promotion perspective. The present study proposes a comprehensive framework based on concepts from health risk communication, Tarde's theory of social values, usability, readability and plain language. Using the mapping approach, an evaluation grid was applied to printed evidence-based materials with proven effectiveness, in order to reveal the underlying strategy and isolate the characteristics of effective materials. The results allowed us to define two types of printed evidence-based materials, according to the robustness of the evidence they contain and the target audience. It was also possible to identify indicators of notions that are translated into operationalized items, frequent in those materials that might be responsible for their efficiency: clear purpose of the documents, limited scope, learning motivation and correspondence to the logic, experience and language of readers. Effectiveness of printed evidence-based materials could also be correlated to numeracy, objectiveness, standard definitions, constant timeframes and denominators, risks enumerated in order of importance, effective response, and high degree of threat, urgency, novelty and visibility of the disease. It was also possible to identify some missing communication concepts: cultural diversity, narrative, increased easiness of procedures and aesthetic advantage for the patient. In the process of work, the theory of social values emerged as a dynamic component that can bring together and explain many concepts, as well as physician’s acceptance of the guidelines. Value in terms of usefulness and truth plays a major role in cognitive appreciation of the documents. This concept gives a strategic meaning to the whole work and allows us to better understand attitude and behavior change.

In today’s multicultural society it is increasingly important that information is made available in a way that allows it to reach as many people as possible. The present study investigates the readability of the information provided in English on a Swedish municipality’s website. While Umeå Municipality sets a good example when it comes to providing information in foreign languages, the question is how easy the information is to read. The methods used to measure the readability of the texts were three automated readability formulas as well as additional analyses focusing on sentence structure and the number of clauses per word. The results show that despite obvious efforts to follow the guidelines for providing public information, more attention needs to be given to the form of the texts themselves. The complexity of the texts as gauged by the reading formulas was in all cases greater than what is recommended for information written for the general public. Some of the texts would seem to require the reader to have a college degree to fully comprehend the information. The supplementary analyses, especially when it comes to the number of clauses per sentence, confirmed the complexity of the texts. The importance of ‘writing for your audience’ thus seems to have been neglected for parts of the analysed material, which implies that some readers may not fully understand their rights and responsibilities regarding the areas addressed on the municipality’s website.

Med hjälp av den här undersökningen i svenska med didaktisk inriktning skapas en uppgiftspecifik lärandematris utifrån en bedömningsmatris med hjälp av Johan Alms femstegsmodell. Avsikten med lärandematrisen är att synliggöra lärandet för eleven och baseras på de styrdokument som Skolverket tillhandahåller. Den har ett elevperspektiv, vilket skiljer den från den mer vedertagna bedömningsmatrisen, som har ett bedömningsperspektiv ur pedagogens vinkel. Lärandematrisens uppbyggnad med tydlig layout och lättillgängligt språk underlättar för elevens förståelse för uppgiften och dess progression vilket bör bidra till ökat kunskapsintag. Litteraturstudiens resultat bekräftar att femstegsmodellen är användbar i skapandet av lärandematrisen, och bekräftar därmed syfte och frågeställning. / With the help of this research in Swedish with didactic focus, a task-specific learning matrix is created based on an assessment matrix using Johan Alm's five-step model. The intention of the learning matrix is to make the learning visible to the student and is based on the steering documents provided by the National Agency for Education. It has a student perspective, which distinguishes it from the more accepted assessment matrix, which has an assessment perspective from the educator´s aspect. The structure of the learning matrix with clear layout and easily accessible language facilitates the student's understanding of the task and its progression, which should contribute to increased knowledge intake. The result of the literature study confirms that the five-step model is useful in the creation of the learning matrix, thereby confirming the purpose and research question.