24 lazy corporate verbs you need to fire

by Laura Hale Brockway 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...

43 odd, awesome, unbelievable town names

As a lover of words, I have always been curious about how things are named — in particular, the names of cities and towns. In Texas, where I live, we have 2,751 cities and towns, some with the most unusual names you can think imagine. Many of these towns are no more than bends in the road, but it’s interesting to think about how these towns were named. What went on at those meetings? 1. Battle 2. Blowout 3. Content 4. Cut and Shoot 5. Dimple 6. Ding Dong (located in Bell County) 7. Dull 8. Earth 9. Elbow 10. Eulogy 11. Fate 12. Foot 13. Frog 14. Frognot 15. Golly 16....

Is that different from or different than...

by Laura Hale Brockway, ELS I’m hoping my readers can help me out on this one.  This week, my associate editor and I disagreed about using different from versus different than. Here is the sentence: “Physician surveys have shown that primary care physicians in rural areas have a notably different work experience than primary care physicians in urban settings.” My associate editor insisted that different than is always wrong and different from should be used. I argued that different than makes better sense in the sentence. A quick check of the rules on the usage of...

18 more words that are fun to pronounce

by Laura Hale Brockway  In a previous post, I wrote about words that are fun to pronounce. On the list were polydactyly, contumelious, and mundungus. At the end of the post, I asked PR Daily readers to share their favorite fun-to-say words—though the allure in some cases may lie more in their definition than their enunciation Here are some of the responses. Click on the word to hear its pronunciation. (Definitions and pronunciations are from Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com.)   Aficianado — a person who likes, appreciates, and knows about an activity or...

Edit the editor: how would you correct t...

This week has been a rough one for editing. From pronoun/antecedent mismatches to sentences that are a parsec long, it seems like I’ve corrected every possible writing error. So, I thought I would call on the collective experience of my readers. How would you fix the following sentences? I’m sharing what I did with them; do you agree? What would you have done? 1. But having a discussion on end-of-life issues could well be the most important discussion you, as a physician, ever have with your patient; helping them through this process allows your patient to think about...

Words that are fun to pronounce

Several years ago, my son was going through a dinosaur phase. He was obsessed with anything and everything about pre-historic life. He wasn’t quite able to read yet, so it fell to me to pronounce words like sinosauropteryx, pachycephalosaurus, and eustreptospondylus when we read his books. Dinosaur names can certainly be a mouthful, but learning to pronounce them gave me a new appreciation for phonetics. Inspired by all this prehistoric nomenclature, I compiled a list of words that are fun to say (dinosaur names not included). Have some fun pronouncing them on your own,...

20 phrases you can replace with one word

Circumlocution is so prevalent in today’s corporate writing that we may not even notice it. In case you’re unfamiliar, circumlocution is the use of many words when one will do. For example, writing “at this point in time” when “now” will work. As PR Daily publisher Mark Ragan often points out at his seminars, readers have “an incredibly shrinking attention span.” As writers and editors, we need to communicate as clearly and concisely as possible. One way we can do this—avoid circumlocution. Here are some examples: Instead of Try            ...

What those performance review phrases re...

We are all familiar with corporate jargon, acronyms, and legalese and how use of these elements can obscure the true meaning of a message. But rarely is language more purposefully obtuse than in an annual performance review. We’ve all been on the receiving end of a performance review in which we’re not quite sure what’s being said. What follows is a sampling of phrases from performance reviews—along with their possible translations. All phrases were taken from the book “2600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews” by Paul Falcone. Note the word...