Plain language and the right to understand in the regulated electricity bill in Spain

Abstract

According to the National Market and Competition Commission (Comisión Nacional del Mercado y la Competencia, CNMC), 40% of domestic users do not understand their electricity bill. This paper analyzes whether the bill, which is mandatory for all domestic consumers by law (consumers with contracts under 15 kW), is written in plain language. Plain language is an essential requirement to achieve the right to understand. This right should be respected and promoted especially by the public administration. The research focuses on the analysis of the model of the regulated electricity bill in Spain, from a double perspective. First, it is analysed whether the text complies with the standards of textuality coming from Text Linguistics, by means of a qualitative approach. Next, a quantitative methodology is used to identify whether the invoice complies with the grammatical recommendations of plain language. The starting hypothesis considers that the text of this document has been written without taking into account the recommendations for plain language from the grammatical perspective, nor have they observed the particularities implied by the reception and comprehension of its contents in a given pragmatic context. The results tend to confirm the hypothesis and, where appropriate, alternative forms of wording are offered that would facilitate a better understanding of the concepts registered in the bill. The current electricity bill has been drawn up as an administrative legal document whose elaboration did not take into account either its recipients or the usefulness that this document should have had for them.