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Avoid Meaningless Words

By: Tim Berry

 

Avoid Meaningless Words

From Seth Godin’s post Meaningless, published January 7…

There are words that now have no meaning at all…

‘Well’ and ‘so’ have been doing this work for a long time, but add to that the more syllabic words like ironically, literally, and hopefully.

And don’t forget all the adjectives, beginning with ‘very’ and ‘really’ that (ironically) make something sound smaller, not bigger.

When you remove meaningless words, the power of your words goes up.

I very much enjoy the simplicity of Seth Godin’s writing style, particularly on blog posts. He practices what he preaches.

And I’d add a lot more words and phrases: game-changing, disruptive, billion-dollar, out-of-the-box, and new paradigm, to name a few.  Awesome and amazing when applied to mundane matters that are neither.

Published: January 17, 2019
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Tim Berry

Tim Berry is co-founder of Have Presence, founder and Chairman of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, and a co-founder of Borland International. He is author of books and software including LivePlan and Business Plan Pro, The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan, and Lean Business Planning, published by Motivational Press in 2015. He has a Stanford MBA degree and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. He taught starting a business at the University of Oregon for 11 years.

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