Tyler Cowen asks, Why are corporate reports hard to read? and cites the amusingly titled Optimisation of cliché synergies:
Apparently there’s a simple reason why annual reports are hard to read: managers, in many cases, are trying to hide something.The study, Annual Report Readability, Earnings and Stock Returns, found that the annual reports of underperforming companies are harder to read than those of companies that are performing well.
Feng Li, an assistant professor of accounting at the university, measured annual report “readability” using a sample of more than 55,000 company reporting years. He examined syllables per word and words per sentence in reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.