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Self-Promoting Puffery, Technical Tripe, and Creative Crap

April 9, 2018 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

cut out bloated wordsPeople’s time is scarce, and their attention is precious. If you want to get your audience to read your emails, newsletters, posts, etc., then follow Jill Konrath‘s advice and cut the following words out of your writing.

They fall into three categories.

Self-Promoting Puffery

  1. One-stop shopping
  2. Industry leader
  3. Breakthrough
  4. Partner
  5. Groundbreaking
  6. Impressive
  7. Unique
  8. Innovative
  9. State-of-the-art
  10. Powerful
  11. Outstanding
  12. Cost-effective
  13. Experienced
  14. Number one
  15. Premier

Technical tripe

  1. Next-generation
  2. Disruptive
  3. Flexible
  4. Robust
  5. World-class
  6. Easy-to-use
  7. Cutting-edge
  8. Value-added
  9. Mission-critical
  10. Leading-edge
  11. Turnkey
  12. Best-of-breed
  13. Enterprise-class
  14. User-friendly
  15. Scalable

Creative Crap

  1. Outside the box
  2. Revolutionary
  3. The big idea
  4. Synergy
  5. Dramatic
  6. Strategic
  7. Game changer
  8. Customer-centric
  9. Voice of the customer
  10. Critical mass
  11. Buzz
  12. Make it pop
  13. Break through the clutter
  14. Next level
  15. Impactful

Jill has given us a good list of the jargon that annoys people in business. What would you add to her list?  What are some of the cliches, buzzwords, and overused terms you see in the nonprofit sector?

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Filed Under: Communicating, Writing Tagged With: buzzwords, jargon, Jill Konrath

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