| dc.description.abstract | This study examines the impact of expressions that are not well arranged in a text on the clarity of the text. I focus on the text “Of Criminal Trespass”, which is almost identical in the penal codes of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. My enquiry concentrates on linguistic clarity in legislative texts, a property conducive to accurate understanding and fast readability or rapid comprehension, where this is distinct from the legal clarity of the content of a legislative text. The framework I employ is developed from Fitzgerald’s (1990, 132-42) concept of clarity in legal codes, which proposes that, in order to maximize clarity of a text, among other things, sentences should follow a particular arrangement in different parts of the text, and these parts should be logically connected with each other. However, this study argues that arrangement or introduction of information below sentence level is also critical for the clarity of a text. A grammatically or semantically (etc.) finished text also needs such precise orientation in the parts of the text and in the pieces of information within each part that the text should appear to the reader maximally transparent. This study operates on the information-units carved out within each section of the text. Information units as discussed in this analysis are the independent building blocks of information in the text such as committer (of the offence), crime-constituting element, crime-constituting act, crime-aggravating intent, object of commission (real or non-real property), time of commission, manner of commission, legal-behavioural frame of mind, options of punishment etc., which might but need not correspond to conventional linguistic units such as word, phrase, clause etc. The analysis finds that in the selected statutory text information is set out in ways that have problematic arrangement, and this diminishes the clarity of the text. This examination reveals five main types of patterns of presentation that damage the clarity of the text: irrational pattern of arrangement or introduction of information, complete but scattered or disorderly information, arranged but oversupplied or undersupplied unique information, redundancy, and mixing information of two incompatible kinds. | eng |