Things I wish people would stop saying

Words and phrases have a tendency to get overused. In digital marketing, whether it's social media or longer-form blogs, this has never been more true.

The internet has a strange way of making people latch onto phrases and never let them go. Between this phenomenon and the tendency of any industry to build an arsenal of jargon, articles and social posts start to become intolerable to read.

A great example of this?

Such as.
The overuse of "such as" makes any paragraph sound stilted and cheap. It's not good language, and you're only using it to try to make your writing sound fancy. Stop trying to sound smart. It's not working.

Any occasion when you're trying to sound smarter or more sophisticated than you are should make you stop and pause. Why are you doing that? Be who you are. If that's slightly less fancy, write that way. It'll be more comfortable to write, which makes your writing sound more natural and read smoothly.

Trying too hard is like a kid looking up synonyms in a thesaurus to make their essay sound smarter. It almost never works out; it's obvious to the teacher (your reader) that you weren't comfortable with that word because it just doesn't land right.

Also on the list? Deliverables, Action item, and Bandwidth in reference to how much work/free time you have.

Be who you are, not who you want to be. If you don't like who you are, become who you want to be before writing that way.