| Summary: | 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.
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