Here are my top candidates.  If you have some to add, please leave a comment.

At the end of the day – Overused.  If you mean after something has been completed or after some period of time, say so.

Adult children – Stop it, please.  Try “sons and daughters.”

Enclosed please find – If you open an envelope and can’t find the piece of paper inside, there’s no hope for you.

Subsequent to – Try saying “after.”

Deliverable – This one belongs at ad agencies – nowhere else.

My bad – Please, somebody take this back to the movie it came from.

Optics – This term deals with light and related phenomena.  In the worlds of politics and journalism, though, it means appearances.  Say “appearances.”

One-off – We were happy with “one-time” and then this wandered over from the U.K. to confuse us.

Move to the next level – Why say something with one word (“advance”) when five words will do?

“It’s for raising capital,” says the entrepreneur.

“It’s for judging the investment potential of start-ups,” says the angel investor.

“I need it to decide on a company’s creditworthiness,” says the banker.

All wrong.

A Plan Is for Planning
The above are important uses of business plans, but they aren’t what the business plan is for.  The business plan is for business planning. But isn’t that obvious?  Not to everyone.  You’ll be shocked to hear this, but many business owners just use their business plan for getting started and then forget about it.  Imagine that.

If you’re starting a new business, you need to go through the rigor of writing the business plan, all the while thinking about the many important aspects of the enterprise and working through the problems that you encounter.  You need to do this yourself.

Let’s consider a few elements of the business plan.

Your Market
Do you understand your market?  Do you have experience in the market or are you looking at it from the outside?  What about competition?  Will your product or service meet an existing need?  Why is your product or service better than what’s already out there?  What about pricing?  Can you realistically predict sales results? Do you truly have a feeling for your market?

People
Your new company may need only a few people at first, but you’ll still have to consider the costs of employment.  What kind of people will you need?  What are the prevailing levels of pay?  Profit sharing?  What about health insurance?  What laws and regulations need to be followed?  Will everybody work full time?  What about unions?

Finance
How much capital will you need to launch your new business and sustain it for, say, two years, until you can achieve a toehold in your industry?  Will you need bank loans?  You’ll need to draw up a starting balance sheet and forecast operating results going out for two or three years.  The forecast will have to be based on realistic assumptions.  It’ll be worth your while to build a detailed financial model that takes a myriad of items into account: salaries, wages, capital expenditures, taxation, and much more.  The model should take virtually everything into account that bears on the performance of the business.  If you’re not a spreadsheet whiz, hire an expert to build the financial model.  Work closely with your expert on this.  Don’t just turn it over for someone else to do.

Revise, Revise, Revise
Say your business plan is complete.  You’ve launched the business and used the plan to bring in an investor to provide much-needed capital.  Your banker used the plan in getting approval for your line of credit.  Now, what do you do with the business plan?  File it away?  The astute business owner will make the business plan a part of his ongoing planning process.  Quarterly and annual budget reviews should tie into the business plan.  In the process, it should be updated on a continuing basis as the company matures.  If you keep revising the business plan as the company moves forward, the plan becomes more and more of a valuable tool.

The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World

Up until now, Web writers have mostly relied on guidance from traditional, i.e., print-oriented, guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style, The Elements of Style, and The Associated Press Stylebook.  (The AP Stylebook does, however, address many Web terms.)

An excellent guide that does offer a thorough overview of issues in writing for the Web is Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works by Janice (Ginny) Redish (2007).

Yahoo! is many things.  It’s a major Internet services company that’s well known for its Web portal, search engine, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and social media services.  But, as far as I know, Yahoo! has never been known for a high standard of writing on its various sites.  We should wait and see what this new style guide covers.

According to pre-publication announcements, Yahoo!’s new style guide will “cover the basics of grammar and punctuation as well as Web-specific ways to perfect a site, such as: identifying the audience and making the site accessible to everyone; constructing clear and compelling copy; developing a site’s unique voice; streamlining text for mobile devices; optimizing Web pages to increase the chances of appearing in search results; and streamlining text so that people can read your pages at Internet speed.”

The Yahoo! style guide has earned praise from Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., a leading Web usability consultant who calls it an “Excellent and eminently useful book with many compelling examples of rewrites. While rewriting content for usability will hugely increase a website’s business value, the word list alone can save you the cost of the book by eliminating wasted time arguing over proper usage.”

I expect to buy a copy of the guide when it comes out and I’ll be joining my fellow blogger Crawford Kilian over at Writing for the Web in hoping that “it has something sensible to say about any company that insists on including an exclamation mark in its name.”  (We Crawfords have to stick together.)

The List first appeared after a New Year’s Eve party in 1975.  Since then, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations for the list, which includes words and phrases from marketing, the media, education, technology, and elsewhere.

We commend LSSU for this important service.

Anyone wishing to submit a word or a phrase for consideration should first check the complete list on the website.

The 2010 list:

Shovel-ready — Transparent / transparency — Czar — Tweet — App — Sexting — Friend as a verb — Teachable moment — In these economic times . . . — Stimulus — Toxic assets — Too big to fail — Bromance — Chillaxin’ — OBAMA-prefix or roots

My client wanted to showcase one of its key services in a way that would be subtler and more versatile than a traditional advertisement.  They had decided to create a case study – often called an “advertorial” – for this purpose.  The idea was to highlight the main features and benefits of the service and show how it solved a specific problem for its customer, an international bank.

Advertorials differ from traditional advertisements in that they are designed to look like articles in the newspapers or magazines they appear in.  In such cases, disclaimers such as “special advertising section” are used.  In the case of this assignment, my client is adding the case study to its website, featuring it in its marketing material, and placing it in business periodicals.  In addition, its customer is free to use the case study as it wishes, in its own marketing program.

After studying the information provided by my client and becoming familiar with the service, I interviewed the appropriate official at the bank to learn about his experience with my client’s service.  Specifically, I found out about the problem at the bank that needed to be solved, how they used the service, and the happy result.

After I completed my final draft, my client and the bank put the draft through several rounds of revision and fine-tuning.

The case study begins with a general description of the bank and its business.  Next, there is a commentary about the bank’s need to correct a particular problem.  Following that came a brief description of my client’s service.  Then quotations from the bank official spoke directly to the specific problem and how well it was solved by my client’s service.  The final element is a product / service description and a general description of my client’s overall business.

Advertorials have been used as a marketing method since the 1960s, mainly in niche marketing and trade publications.  Lately they have become more popular in mainstream publications.  Many companies have begun to experiment with employing them to promote products and services without incurring advertising agency expense.

My understanding has always been that “healthful” means contributing to the state of good health and “healthy” means enjoying the state of good health.  Eating healthful food can make you healthy.  My Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition backs me up: healthful – “favorable to the health of mind or body; healthy – “enjoying or indicative of good health”.

“Healthy” has been a trendy word for a long time.  Over the years it has gained strength and all but pushed “healthful” aside.  Holdouts like me are accused of being pretentious when we talk about a “healthful diet”.  I don’t mind.  Sometimes you have to take a stand.

What does this have to do with writing in the business world?  All “healthy” all the time is lazy writing.  We should keep the difference between “healthful” and “healthy” in mind whenever we come up against health-related copy.  Skilled copy-writers should be able to retain the punch of the word  “healthy” and still give “healthful” its due.

Comments?

1.  Simplicity: Use Small Words. Avoid words that might cause your readers to reach for the dictionary.  They likely won’t bother to look up unfamiliar words.  Instead, they’ll either let your real meaning sail over their heads or, worse, they’ll misunderstand you.

2.  Brevity: Use Short Sentences. “Be as brief as possible.  Never use a sentence when a phrase will do, and never use four words when three can say just as much.”

3.  Credibility Is As Important As Philosophy. “People have to believe it to buy it.  As Lincoln once said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.  If your words lack sincerity, if they contradict accepted facts, circumstances, or perceptions, they will lack impact.”

4.  Consistency Matters. “Repetition.  Repetition. Repetition.  Good language is like the Energizer Bunny.  It keeps going . . . and going . . . and going.”  Find a good message and stick to it.  Coke created “It’s the real thing” in 1943.  Wheaties created the “Breakfast of Champions” tagline in 1935, the same year Campbell’s Soup came up with “M’m! M’m! Good!”

5.  Novelty: Offer Something New. Businesses should try to tell customers something that gives them a brand-new take on an old idea.  If successful, the new message will bring a “sense of discovery”.  If your message generates an “I didn’t know that” response, you have succeeded.

6.  Sound and Texture Matter. “The sound and texture of language should be just as memorable as the words themselves.”  For example: Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is” and M&M’s “Melts in your mouth . . .”

7.  Speak aspirationally. “Messages need to say what people want to hear.  This is the one area where politicians often have the edge over the corporate community.  It’s very difficult to craft advertising language that touches people at the most fundamental, primal level, by speaking to their deepest hopes, dreams, and fears.”  The key to success is to “personalize and humanize the message to trigger an emotional remembrance”.

8.  Visualize. “The slogans we remember for a lifetime almost always have a strong visual component, something we can see and almost feel.  Allstate’s ‘You’re in good hands’, first created in 1956, went so far as to include the cupped hands visual in its logo to remind people of its peace-of-mind guarantee.

9.  Ask a Question. “‘Got Milk?’ may be the most memorable print ad campaign of the past decade.  The creator realized . . . that it’s sometimes not what you say but what you ask that really matters.”

10.  Provide Context and Explain Relevance. “You have to give people the ‘why’ of a message before you tell them the ‘therefore’ and the ’so that.’”

It seems that almost every day now you hear people using the phrase, “That begs the question.”  Unfortunately, most people get it wrong.

I suspect they’re like me; they know that for some reason that isn’t quite clear, it sounds smarter than, “That raises the question.”  So they think if they use it, they’ll sound smart, too.

I was lucky.  Maybe I picked it up in Freshman Writing, or maybe I heard William F. Buckley use it on Firing Line to put old Bella Abzug in her place.

In any case, I had a vague notion it meant more than raising a question, and a little research revealed that it is a logical fallacy.  It means to assume what you are trying to prove.

If all WFB had been saying was, “Bella, that raises a question,” milquetoast responses like that would’ve killed Firing Line in its first season.  What he was really saying was, “Bella, I believe your argument is a classic case of petitio principia.  You’re assuming that which you are trying to prove.”

Unfortunately for his opponents, WFB could spot a logical fallacy from a hundred paces.

Here’s an example of begging the question that turned up with a little web research:

Person A: Selling liquor on Sundays is illegal in this town, because it’s bad.

Person B: They sell liquor in the next town over on Sundays, and everyone’s okay with that.  Why is it bad?

Person A: If it weren’t bad, it wouldn’t be illegal, would it?

Person A demonstrates that begging the question is a form of circular reasoning.  He is begging the question (Why is it bad to sell liquor on Sunday?) because the answer he gives fails to demonstrate that selling liquor on Sunday is bad.  It just assumes it’s bad.

Here’s another, less obvious one:

Person A: I believe you should be a good person.

Person B: But I just want to make as much money as possible and do what I want to do.  Why should I be good?

Person A: Because being good benefits society.

Again, Person A begs the question (Why should I be good?) because the answer he gave is the same as his premise.  “Benefit society” is just another way of saying “Be good.”  Being good is benefiting society.  You might as well say, “Benefiting society benefits society.”

If you’re interested in other logical fallacies, check out a book on composition and rhetoric, such as: The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric.

Ron Vlieger is a financial writer in New York City.

Comments from the three experts:

Geraint Anderson was one of the UK’s top four brokers before writing his book Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile about “financial philanderings” in the financial services industry.  In the documentary, he said, “we in the City use arcane language and peculiar terminology to confuse those who don’t earn as much as us (i.e., pretty much everyone).  It makes us sound like we’re doing something extraordinarily complicated and technically unfathomable and keeps our potential detractors in the dark.  We are a much harder target if the ‘common man’ feels intimidated by our complex world and doesn’t even understand what we do.  We push around bits of paper.  That’s what we do.  That’s all we do.”

Alchemy Partners’ Jon Moulton, another highly respected financial figure, made this comment: “UK banks got involved with things they couldn’t measure, couldn’t control, didn’t understand.  Some got into very sexy, almost incomprehensible contracts.  Synthetic mezzanine CLO squareds?  Not sure I know what it is either but I promise you that some of the banks have them.”

Neil Smith, the chief investment officer at Corham Capital said, the “simple fact is that things had become so complicated that only those people directly involved with the creation of these products knew what they were.  CDO (collateralized debt obligation) guys had every sales trick in the book . . . .  Their whole strategy was to make people feel silly if they didn’t understand the product.”

Let’s learn from this.  When we encounter unclear communication on an important subject – in business, finance, politics, or elsewhere – somebody is probably hiding something.

[I plead guilty to committing a serious business jargon offense.  According to the Daily Telegraph, “credit crunch” occupies the number 8 spot on their top-20 list of the most despised business jargon terms.]

h/t to Plain English Campaign

We’ve heard this advice many times over.  So why do managers at top companies and experienced business owners make so many disastrous (and expensive) mistakes in their marketing communication?

A few classic examples from the global business file:

•    Executives at General Motors didn’t understand why the Chevy Nova wasn’t selling well in Latin America until they realized that in Spanish “no va” means “it doesn’t go.”
•    Ford marketed the Comet in Mexico as the Caliente, which literally means “hot.”  Colloquially, it means “horny” or “streetwalker.”
•    Perdue’s slogan, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” was mistranslated into Spanish as “It takes a man to make a chicken aroused.”

We can’t get away with only considering how well we write something.

We must never lose sight of our audience.  How will they receive our message?