How to purge your marketing vocabulary of clichés and buzzwords

William Faulkner once said that “in writing, you must kill your darlings”.

What he meant was that you shouldn’t get attached to your own work. To make your prose better, you often need to cut out your favourite parts.

Faulkner’s advice was aimed at novelists, but the same principle holds true for copywriters and marketers. We, too, have darlings that need to die.

Our darlings are not characters or plot twists. Rather, they are clichés and buzzwords — those well-worn phrases that pepper our websites and marketing materials.

Disruptive! Game-changing! Cutting edge!

As we’ve argued before, there’s a compelling case for banishing these words from your marketing vocabulary. Not only is original writing more persuasive, but it’s also a powerful branding tool. Originality separates you from the other companies in your industry. It gives you an identity that people remember.

Alas, banishing clichés is harder than you might think. They’re sneaky little bastards, and they’ll creep into your writing when you’re not paying attention. Even professional copywriters (i.e. people who should know better) are occasionally tempted to describe a company as innovative or a product as paradigm-shifting.

Start a kill list

Take a pen and paper, and write down a list of the worst business clichés you can think of. Keep writing until you’ve got at least twenty or thirty examples.

This is your kill list. To cut through the fog of marketing bullshit and communicate like a human being, you need to permanently banish these words and phrases from your vocabulary.

Whenever you write something — an email, a web page, a social media post — check your work against the kill list. Be hard on yourself. Look at what you’ve written with a critical eye and keep editing until you’ve killed every last buzzword in sight.

Soon enough you’ll get into a routine. By constantly monitoring your writing for word-crimes, you’ll get better at not committing those crimes in the first place.

The system in action

At Recreate, our job is to help companies communicate more effectively. Which means we have a zero-tolerance policy toward clichés, buzzwords, and useless jargon.

We’ve built up a healthy kill list over the years. I won’t share the whole thing with you, but these are some of the highlights:

Innovative

Disruptive

Agile

Actionable

Synergy

Leverage

Cutting edge

Game-changing

Paradigm-shifting

Results-oriented

Anything 2.0

360-degree

Thought leadership

Low-hanging fruit

Think outside the box

Move the needle

Hit the ground running

None of these words or phrases have a legitimate use in marketing communication. When we catch one of our copywriters using such language, we drag him into the town square, strip him naked, and flog him with a horse whip until he cries for mercy. (We don’t really do that. We just fire him.)

Remember the first rule

Identifying clichés takes a little practice. Some are blatantly obvious; others blend into their surroundings. There’s no universal agreement on what constitutes a cliché, so you’ll need to use your own judgement.

As a general guide, you can’t go past George Orwell’s first rule of writing:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

In other words, don’t repeat the same meaningless crap you’ve heard a thousand times. Don’t use the same language as your competitors.

Instead, be bold. Say something worth saying — something you’ve never heard else anyone say before.

And if that proves too difficult, get in touch with the good folks at Recreate.