As a plain language editor, I see my job as reducing extraneous cognitive load as much as I can, through language choices and document design. I’m motivated by the cost savings and simple empathy for my reader but also by the human rights and social justice aspects of the plain language movement. We have a right to understand our legislation to participate in our democracy. And patients and research participants should be able to understand their informed consent documents to make sound health decisions.
The model of mental burden as suffering gives us another ethical imperative to reduce cognitive load: people in marginalized groups are the most preoccupied and have the least working memory to spare. Forcing them to process more information than needed just reinforces the inequity.
The logical extension to my plain language work is to figure out how to relieve not only cognitive load but mental burden more generally. And, because relieving mental burden isn’t a zero-sum game, how can I do it in the most efficient way, to help as many people I can at once?
A load off your mind 
comments on cognitive load from C16:
I know some will say it is a mingled language. And why not so much the better, taking the best of both the other? Another will say it wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath that praise that it wanteth not grammar. For grammar it might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon’s curse, that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind, which is the end of speech, that hath it equally with any other tongue in the world; and is particularly happy in compositions of two or three words together, near the Greek, far beyond the Latin,—which is one of the greatest beauties that can be in a language. Sir Phillip Sydney, Defence of Poesy http://www.bartleby.com/27/1.html
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