Props to Andrew McAfee at MIT for his 2012 HBR piece "When did Yoda Start Writing CEO Speeches?" on the sad state of corporate English. While there is little push back on his proposition -- that corporate leaders talk more like Yoda than Hemingway -- there seems to be little consensus as to what to do about it. It might be helpful to the discussion to look at some of the possible reasons for all the fractured syntax and fog-shrouded declaration. Here are a few to think about. 1. Quarterly earnings reports are a pain for communicators because there usually isn't much change (or maybe progress) in 90 days. Thus there is pressure to say the same things over and over but wrapped in rhetorical variations or trying to distract the audience with less meaningful asides. 2. Making bold statements or, worse yet, clear projections inspires great copy but huge legal liabilities. Caution is therefore in the DNA of anyone responsible for talking to investors. 3. The social sciences, along with information technology, have given the English language a host of words and concepts that can be applied to virtually any pursuit, including business. Their education once limited to the classics and the so-called hard sciences, leaders now are nurtured by broader academic disciplines and, to no good end, convoluted academic discourse. They also read a lot of questionable advice in books that make it to the remainder shelf at a frightening pace. 4. Word processing software has to take some of the blame. Prior to the advent of endless open ended editing and freewheeling composition writers had to be more careful. It was such a chore to rewrite and provide "clean copies" of a typewritten document, that people thought before they wrote, not the other way around. 5. Great writers and communicators -- people truly dedicated to their craft -- are limited in number while the occasions for communication are unlimited in a world spinning in cyberspace. Do the math. There will always be exceptions to these general trends. Those companies who are able to speak in a clear voice get rewarded, in our opinion, not by a higher stock price necessarily but by a lower risk premium on their securities. Investors simply have more confidence in what they have to say. Overall, though, if you consider these and likely many other factors, it is hard to see how the challenge of clear communication will be met in any broad-based way. Perhaps the answer is that members of our species will evolve -- if they haven't already -- by developing a solid instinct for penetrating all the BS they hear every day. Listen to the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan: "Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."