"Smith Co. comprises a B2B2C solution that provides an efficient, mutually beneficial partnership between consumers of health care and the businesses-payers, providers and suppliers of health services and non-health related companies alike-which would like to serve them."

Confused much? Me too. That's a sample of an "award-winning business plan" I pulled off the Internet, and it illustrates a problem that's become pervasive in business writing: pudgy, jargon-filled, clunky language that sounds institutional and means nothing. This problem isn't isolated to low-level paper-pushers. Everyone is guilty, right up to the CEOs of major corporations who send out memos so filled with unintelligible writing that they require a decoder ring. Because this type of writing has become commonplace, it's trickled down into business plans as well, where well-meaning entrepreneurs (see above) try to emulate it. The thinking goes that if the head of XYZ Major Bank writes like that, it must be right.

Wrong.

Simple, clear writing always trumps convoluted business speak. Trust me, using words like "utilization" and "synergistically," and phrases like, "evaluation and prioritization of the company's synergies will continue upon commencement of operations" doesn't help your chances of getting funding.

George Orwell made a great point about the uselessness of this language, by translating a paragraph from Eccelsiastes into the sort of institutional language I'm talking about.

From Ecclesiastes: "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Orwell's rewrite:

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

Which do you think reads better?