Reading the instructions

is not necessarily easy.
I fill out an awful lot of forms in my job - even now that I am trying to cut back on the amount of work I do. There have been times when I felt as if I did nothing else. 
Reading the instructions on forms is not a straightforward thing. I am not including here the forms which are not written in English. I do not expect those to be straightforward but that is because of my own linguistic skills - or lack thereof. 
No, I mean the English language forms I seem to need to tackle daily. Even the forms written in "Plain English", "Basic English" or "Simple English" are not as clear as they could be.
Due to the resignation of our local ward councillor we need to vote for a new one. Material has come out, along with the voting paper. I tried to make sense of these yesterday, the first chance I actually had to read it carefully. By the end of it I was confused. The candidate statements were all of the "how many words can I use to say nothing?" variety.  The instructions for how to mark the ballot paper and return it were equally confusing.
As a law student I had to study legislation - and how it is written.  I can remember being given an exercise which asked us to write a small part of a piece of legislation.  Legislation of course is there to tell us how the law is to be applied.
    "Try and cover all the possibilities," we were told. 
I worked with a fellow mature age student. We came up with six different ways of saying the same thing - enough for the exercise in question. Then we went a step further and pulled them apart as might be done by barristers in front of a judge. We passed our assignments in.  At the next lecture we  waited rather nervously for the results.
I was almost relieved when the lecturer said, "Well now Cat and Chris have done exactly what I hoped for. How long did it take you two to dream up those versions?" 
The other students had handed in just one idea each of course. In doing the assignment they had often written something they simply thought said the what was intended. Being older Chris and I could see what the lecturer wanted. He wanted us to understand how difficult it is to write something that cannot be torn down by a misplaced word or comma or phrase.  
I have been writing instructions for another project lately. It is the sort of writing I do not enjoy. This time I have someone else reading the instructions and following them. She has an analytical sort of mind and, had things been different after the war, she might have gone to university and done maths. She would have been very good at it. It really helps me.
I wish the people who had written the statements and the voting form had consulted her before sending that material out.