Killing the Buzzwords: A Before/After

The best way I know to explain what’s wrong with most website copy is not to describe it but to rewrite it. So let me do that. These examples are composites of patterns I see constantly when auditing sites, with details changed, but every one of them is a sentence type you have seen this week.

Before: “We deliver innovative, end-to-end solutions that empower businesses to unlock their full potential.” After: “We build inventory software for auto parts stores.” The before version could describe a bank, a gym franchise, or a management consultancy. That’s the tell. If a sentence would survive being pasted onto a competitor’s site, or onto the site of a company in a different industry entirely, it contains no information. Information is what excludes possibilities. “Inventory software for auto parts stores” excludes almost everything, which is why it tells you almost everything.

Before: “Leveraging cutting-edge AI to transform your workflow.” After: “Our software reads your invoices and enters them into QuickBooks so you don’t have to.” Notice what the rewrite was forced to do: name the input, name the output, name the person’s actual chore. The buzzword version isn’t just vaguer, it’s lazier. Writing “transform your workflow” requires knowing nothing about the customer. Writing the plain version requires knowing exactly which twenty minutes of their day you eliminate. Buzzwords are how companies hide, sometimes from customers, sometimes from themselves, the fact that they haven’t figured this out.

Before: “Best-in-class performance meets enterprise-grade security.” After: “Pages load in under a second, and your data is encrypted and never shared.” The before is two claims that grade themselves. “Best-in-class” is a verdict, and readers don’t accept verdicts from the defendant. The after makes claims a reader can evaluate, and, importantly, claims you can be held to. That’s the real function of plain language: it creates accountability, which is another word for trust. A visitor may not consciously think “this sentence is falsifiable, therefore I trust it,” but the instinct operates all the same. We believe people who speak as if they could be checked.

The process behind these rewrites is mechanical, which is good news, because it means you don’t need to be a writer to do it. Take each sentence on your homepage and ask three things. First, could a competitor use this sentence unchanged? If yes, delete it or sharpen it until they couldn’t. Second, does the sentence contain a noun a customer could picture? “Solutions” is not picturable. “Invoices,” “delivery trucks,” “waiting rooms” are. Third, if a customer repeated this sentence to their spouse over dinner, would it sound like human speech? Nobody says “we adopted a platform that empowers our team.” They say “we got a thing that does the invoices now.” The dinner-table version is usually the correct copy, lightly cleaned up.

There’s a predictable objection: our customers are sophisticated, and this plain style will sound simplistic to them. My experience is the reverse. Sophisticated buyers are the most allergic to fog, because they’ve sat through the most vendor pitches and learned that fog is where the weaknesses hide. An engineer evaluating your product reads “seamlessly integrates with your stack” and hears “we have an API of unknown quality.” The same engineer reads “syncs with Postgres and MySQL; a full sync of a million rows takes about a minute” and starts to relax, because that’s how people who have actually built the thing talk. Plain language doesn’t signal a simple product. It signals a team with nothing to hide.

The deeper reason buzzwords persist is that they’re written for the wrong audience. Nobody writes “unlock your full potential” for customers. They write it for the boss who will review the page, the investor who might see it, the internal committee that needs every department’s adjective included. The copy becomes a treaty between insiders rather than a message to outsiders. And treaties read like treaties. The stranger arriving from a search result was never party to the negotiation and owes it nothing. The single most useful mental trick I know is to write for one specific person you’ve actually met, a real customer with a name, and check every sentence against whether it would make sense to them, said aloud.

When I was building GazeSite’s Clarity checks, I had to make this operational, since software can’t feel vagueness the way a reader does. What worked was hunting for the symptoms: abstract nouns stacked on abstract nouns, verbs like “empower” and “enable” and “transform” that take no concrete object, claims with no number, no noun, and no named audience anywhere near them. It turns out fog has a texture you can detect. But you don’t need software to start. You need one uncomfortable hour with your homepage, a printout, and a pen, crossing out every phrase that could belong to someone else’s company. What survives will look sparse. Sparse is fine. A homepage that says one true, specific, checkable thing beats a homepage that says ten impressive nothings, because the stranger reading it can finally do what they came to do: understand you, and decide.