Studies

Every tool on this site measures one piece of text at a time. These are what happens when the same analyzers are pointed at a whole public corpus instead — original research, with the raw data published alongside so anyone can check it or disagree with it.

What a Regulator Calls Unclear

SEC staff quote the phrase they could not follow and tell the filer to rewrite it in plain English. We ran this site's own diagnostics over every such phrase from 2004 to 2025, against matched prose from the same filing: most of them do no better than chance, because the regulator flags jargon and the tools look for sentence structure.

The Lay Summary Gap

Federal regulation requires every registered clinical trial to summarise itself in language written for the lay public. We scored 294,566 of those summaries against the 8th-grade target health-literacy guidance names: 99.3% miss it, and the gap is sentence length rather than jargon.

What Simplification Is Made Of

English and Simple English Wikipedia describe the same subjects, one of them rewritten to be easier. We scored 1,398 matched pairs: word choice carries more of the gain than sentence length, and Simple English contains just as much passive voice per word as English does.

The Plain English Paradox

The SEC has required plain English in part of every prospectus since 1998, and enforces it. We measured 984 prospectuses on both sides of that boundary — the regulated sections are the hardest ones.

The Notice/Rule Gap

Congress ordered plain English for one class of federal document in 2010 and exempted another. We measured 20,710 documents across 26 years to see whether it made any difference.