Non-scary purchase/sale contract?

[Jim Kelly]

The sales contracts I've been finding all seem to be stuck in 1975, when you wanted a piece of paper that made your lawyer feel at home, which you could xerox and reuse for every deal by filling in blanks and attaching appendices, without having to retype it.

Even the simplest are still dark and full of terrors.  For example:

The Cryptic Assertion, for example "Taxes will be prorated."  I still can't figure out what this means.  Who's on the hook to prorate them? Once they're good and prorated, what happens then?  Just tell me what I care about: what taxes do you expect me to pay, and what taxes will you be taking off my hands?

The Mystic Incantation, for example "earnest money."  As an inanimate object, money can be neither earnest nor deceitful, so this is a nonsense phrase. It must be here because it has some secret meaning to lawyers, and if invoked in a courtroom surprising things will happen.  In other words, this language says "Danger!  If you want to understand this offer, go hire a lawyer."  Just tell me the basics: when would I get your 1000 bucks, and when would you get it back?

The Calendar-less Schedule.  This thing is supposed to happen 30 days after that thing, which is supposed to happen 15 days after that other thing.  Nice that this lets me work out the timeline just as easily if I happen to be using the Mayan calendar.  But as I'm probably not, it would be great if you could work out the Gregorian dates for me.  If you mean August 12th, say "August 12th."  If you mean "hopefully within six weeks," you might as well be tentative in a way that sells better: "You should be holding a check at your Labor Day barbecue."

I could rant more about the mysterious passive voice, the needless cross-references, and the pompous hereofs and hereins.  Don't even get me started on the underlines. But the point is there's huge room for improvement in user friendliness.

Clarity sells.  And it avoids legal problems.  So I'm looking for a contract that optimizes on clarity and comfort for my seller (or buyer), even if it requires some 2017 technology to reproduce for each deal.