A halt for the "no no" buzz words in strategic writing

Entertain me as I stand on my writers soap box for a second, will ya'll?

I came across a tweet from @MarkRaganCEO, CEO of Ragan Communications, publisher of PR Daily, PR Daily Europe, Ragan.com etc. etc... on my Twitter feed that advocated the cease and desist, for corporate communication "buzz" words, as have so many other similar articles I've read, because they're apparently "lazy" and "throwaway" type verbs.

Here's an excerpt of the article....

A common problem with corporate writing is that it’s full of lazy, meaningless verbs. Utilize, implement, leverage—these words litter our writing and weaken our message.

“We are leveraging our core competencies to meet our customers needs.”

I stopped reading when I saw the word “leveraging.”

The verb is the powerhouse of your sentence. Choose clear, active verbs instead of throwaway ones. I hereby call for a ban on the following verbs from corporate writing, press releases, social media, and websites. Try these alternatives instead.

Instead of...                   Try..... 

accompany                   go with

ballpark                        estimate

commence                   begin

consolidate                  join

dialogue                      talk

Laura Hale Brockway author of the article, an Austin-based writer and editor, is a contributing writer to PR daily. Here's the full article.

I get Laura's point. We need to get to the POINT when we communicate and our word selection determines how quickly and effectively we get there. That said, the English language offers the most abundant word choice of all the human languages and with it comes flexibility and variation in how we communicate with our clients. I am tired of reading article after article about what words PR practitioners should eliminate from their vocab or communication materials because apparently they're lazy. You know what, sometimes using the same word over and over again becomes BORING and a real SNOOZE. How many times have you listened to or read a piece of communication collateral and zoned out because it was mundane and seemed repetitive? The key, folks, is to mix it up! Keep it interesting, fluid, "engaging", oh no! I just used a buzz word no-no. ;)You don't want to speak on a level your clients or audience doesn't understand or appear false with your "fancy" corporate vocab but gee wiz you don't have to put them to sleep either.

Here's my advice. If you can picture the action of the word, you're good to go.

Let's take consolidate for example. For a simple visual, imagine you have a collection of similar words or ideas on a piece of paper and you want to make that list smaller and more organized. To do that, you'd want to consolidate it, right? So you take all those words or ideas and reduce them to a smaller list by identifying and grouping which are similar. Voila!

So, let's keep it interesting shall we?! Let's do what we do best! Use compelling, lively and powerful combinations of words to communicate our message.

I shall descend from my box.