Andrew Pegler, plain English writer and editor, is frustrated by the language that dominates business and law. In "Join Winnie's War and Mind Your Language" he has harsh words for what passes as communcation these days:
As a practising plain English editor and writer, I can assure you this
battle is coming at us on many fronts, from the supermarket shelves to
our national capital. It is fed by intellectual vanity, fear of looking
dumb, pesky lawyers (of course) and a public that has been bludgeoned
into submission by its heavy, dull, self-important pedantry. This enemy
of clarity and friend of the obscurantist feeds off our numb acceptance
of it in our everyday lives.
Fight the good fight!
These jumbled assaults on my beloved English seem designed to
intimidate, depersonalise and, I suspect, divert the reader from the
fact that the writer does not really have an answer. Scratch the
surface and you are in free fall, for these battalions of nothingness
often carry no precise meaning.
Plain English as transparency. Nice.