Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well intentioned letter, anguish of a traveller expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. E. B. White in his revision of the 1935 classic"The Elements of Style", by William Strunk.

The real threat of unclear language is its power to extinguish thoughtful public discourse about important issues. When people don’t understand what they’re reading or hearing, they’re not likely to respond, react, or comment. Instead, they’ll choose to opt out.

Toward the end of the 1970s, the decade that replaced the used car with the “pre-owned vehicle,” an alert reporter discovered that park rangers in the Grand Canyon were routinely killing wild burros. The beasts’ grazing evidently contributed to soil erosion. Confronted with a charge of organised slaughter, a ranger objected: “We prefer to call it direct reduction.” Some two decades later, a more benign but equally squeamish American foundation reported that it was lowering the incidence of “negative health outcomes” among a group of poor people. Fewer of the people, it seems, had died.

To be fair, death and disease leave most people groping for euphemisms. So perhaps the minced words in these cases can be indulged, if not quite forgiven. Yet something more mysterious seems to be afoot in this next bit of gibberish, culled from a memo recommending grants for education reform: "These grants will incentivize administrators and educators to apply relevant metrics to assess achievement in the competencies they seek to develop."

The writer seems to be saying that the grants would be used to pay teachers and principals who agree to test their students. Yet the writer was evidently embarrassed by this mercenary depiction of educators (who seem to need “incentivizing” before they will consent to administer a test) and by the crudeness of ordinary learning, compared with which “achieving competencies” offers young people a more refined and elevating experience.

What could have inspired this writer to dance so awkwardly around his subject? “Muddled thinking” is one common, if unkind, explanation. Many critics of clumsy writing are inclined to advance it almost automatically in situations like this one. Trouble is, it doesn’t fit this case. The memo goes on - albeit in much the same style - to present a carefully reasoned and politically astute argument. The fact that it takes three readings to figure out what that argument might be is unfortunate for both the reader and the writer. But once it’s puzzled out, the reasoning leaves no grounds for suspecting careless thought.

A more plausible explanation might be an excess of caution. The writer is, after all, proposing to give people money for doing something that many (less astute) observers would consider merely all-in-a-day’s-work. The sentence, like much of the rest of the memo, grapples with some relatively ungainly political facts: Many teachers dislike the kinds of tests, the test results will embarrass some schools and teachers. Rather than state all of that bluntly, and thereby risk scaring off fellow officers, trustees, and assorted allies, the writer may have chosen to veil the controversy in a camouflage of doubletalk.

A third possibility, in some ways the most likely, is that the writer (and even some readers) consider the doubletalk a matter of stature, a lofty and imposing verbal proscenium befitting the complex drama it frames. The cavalcade of Latinate coinages - incentivize, metrics, assess, competencies -marches past us in all its plumage as if to say, “Stand back! Something marvellous is coming.”

Using words that way, as mere trappings of nobility, is often taken for arrogance, but it may well be just the opposite. Authors who feel unduly humbled by the weightiness of their subject may feel bound to pay it the homage of addressing it in Latin. The problem, in that case, is not a haughty author, but an overly deferential one. If you’re intimidated by your subject - or worse, by the brazenly exhibitionist act of writing about it to an informed public - you may resort to the learned equivalent of hemming and hawing. You thatch together a few verbal fig leaves to deflect censure, rather than expose anything remarkable.

But those expressions, precisely because they are so enthusiastically received among the faithful in the pews, quickly become habit-forming. In time, through overuse, the popular words come not to express serious thinking, but to replace it.

When someone writes - as one actually did - that “a geographically targeted effort will benefit from synergies,” the writer no doubt had a point. But because of the soothing, almost narcotic effect of the jargon, she or he was evidently unaware that the point was never made. Even the old hands who know these words well will gain no insight from reading this sentence (though they may glide right past it, mollified by the murmur of reassuring sounds). Those helpless lay readers who don’t spend their days talking about synergies and targets could only be baffled - or, in a worse but likely case, annoyed. A few people, grappling with the sentence about synergies, might silently defer to the author’s superior expertise, assuming that the writing expressed something important but beyond their ken. That misimpression might even have been intentional, but probably it wasn’t. Most writers don’t set out to intimidate, overwhelm, or befuddle their public.

Nonetheless texts for some years have been consumed with a search for greater accountability, for a philanthropic bottom line, for metrics of achievement, and so on. Authors insist they want dialogue and partnership with their grantees, and feedbackfrom their stakeholders. From all this earnestness we can only conclude that writers are trying to own up to their ambitions, and to be held to account when they fail. Why, then, does their speech so thoroughly belie those good intentions?

The only charitable answer is that they don’t realize what they’re saying and writing. All that leaden verbiage means something to them, or so they believe, so it comes to them as a bit of a shock when no one else can guess at their meaning.

Of course, the easiest response to impenetrable writing is simply to cast it aside, and that is, in fact, what most people do with it. But an unlucky minority have no choice but to read some of the denser material, because their jobs require that they follow what people are writing. Among those readers, the stilted or pompous writer will encounter something worse than indifference: distrust. Whether the listeners are your grantees, colleagues, scholars or ordinary citizens, they are likely to conclude, over time, that your words don’t mean as much as they seem to. Or worse, they may come to suspect some contraband of inscrutable hidden meaning secreted behind every comma, traps of sophistry set for the unsuspecting. Either way, any hope of informing or persuading people has been defeated.