"We can assist retail establishments to enhance profitability by demonstrating methodologies for optimal utilization of personnel resources."

No, that's not something I read somewhere.  I made it up.  I wanted to create, as an example, a grammatically correct but uncommunicative sentence, without being accused of wielding an ax against a possibly identifiable author.

That sentence took me much longer to write than I usually take to construct a sentence of similar length.  It is not my style to be purposely obscure and pretentious.  Yet, in business writing and elsewhere today, one sees many sentences, sometimes entire documents, written in this manner.

The problem is not that writers use jargon.  Even I will concede that, when specialists are communicating with one another, some jargon is appropriate. It is that this style of writing is unclear.  Gobbledygook – also spelled "gobbledegook" and meaning "wordy and unclear jargon" – can muddy the clearest stream of thought.

Nor is the problem with polysyllabic words.  Long words are not, in themselves, bad (or good, for that matter).  In my second paragraph above, I used (not "utilized") uncommunicative and identifiable, not because they are long words but because they are precisely the words I needed. However, given a choice (and there usually is one), the writer who wants to express an idea clearly should choose the shortest, most common words to do the job.  As Strunk and White put it in their splendid little book, The Elements of Style:  "Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able."

I wish I could get my students to observe this principle.  Many of them believe that they lack the vocabulary to write the kind of essays I assign, yet most of the topics can be covered perfectly well with words they know and understand.   Nevertheless, they persist in using an unnatural style that they think is more "collegiate," believing that "fancier" words will earn them a better grade.  The resulting essays are awkward, wordy, and unclear.

As an exercise I sometimes give my students a quotation such as this:  Measurable periods during which an action, process, or condition exists or occurs have a tendency to move in or pass through the air as if carried by membranous or feathered paired appendages if it is apparent that, during the course of this action, process, or condition, the individual so involved is amusingly, entertainingly, or enjoyably engaged.  I then ask them to back-translate it into a six-word sentence.  Most of them haven't any idea what it means; those who figure it out do so only with considerable effort.  (The answer, if you haven't guessed, is:  "Time flies when you're having fun.")

The point I am trying to make with this exercise is that wordy, roundabout, pretentious prose does not get the point across.  Plain English does.

Already I can hear the graduate school gurus screaming:  "But that is not my style!"  Dear misguided friend:  If your style is polysyllabic gibberish, laden with imprecise and pretentious nouns and virtually devoid of active verbs, it is not style.  It is a bad habit, possibly something you cultivated to impress some professor whose chief area of expertise is pedantry.

Nowhere is pretentious style more out of place than in sales or promotional writing.  The purpose of such writing is to get attention and to persuade the recipient to spend money.  Throw in a few words such as methodology and utilization, and your promotional piece is destined for the wastebasket.

Good style is still very much as it is defined in The Elements of Style, which should be required reading for every writer.  In fact, all of us who make our living (or part of it) via the written word – writers, editors, teachers – would do well to reread this book regularly.  It reminds us of ways to avoid lapsing (or relapsing) into the bad habits that even professionals can develop.

The rules of style are simple.  They are:  (1) Be clear.  (2) Be concise.  (3) Be specific.  (4) Be precise.  (5) Be correct.  That is all.  (But that may sometimes be much harder work than being wordy and muddled is.)  True, some broader considerations, such as organization of the total work, are important.  In the particulars of writing style itself, however, these five goals are all that matter.  Why anyone would purposely do just the opposite of what Strunk and White advise is beyond me.  But I see such wretched writing every day.  If I weren't an editor and a teacher, I would never read the stuff.  So why would anyone else?