Real words are still harder to come by than we might think.

To understand why … let's travel back to 2000. (Walk with me … .)

In 2000, Instagram and LinkedIn didn't exist. Facebook wouldn't arrive for another four years. Steak-Umms was just a sliced beef product—not a satisfyingly weird Twitter feed dispensing both wise truths and absurdist commentary. And tweeting in lower-case text, as if e.e. cummings was available in the freezer section. Case in point:¹

Yet the foundation of all of our current social platforms, from Tumblr to TikTok, was there in 2000, in the form of email lists, news groups, web pages, blogs, and chat rooms.

Marketing began to shift. For the first time, the Internet enabled—at scale—conversations between brands and people, and between people and people. “Markets are conversations,” wrote the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999.

Suddenly what William Strunk and E. B. White had written decades earlier had new relevance: “Write in a way that comes naturally … Prefer the standard to the offbeat.”²

In other words, write for real people. Use real words. Quit the brand-speak. Soften the standoffish formal tone. Lose the clichés and buzzwords.

Yet here we are, decades later, and our writing and content are still littered with deep-dive revolutionary, value-added, growth-hacked, impactful, cutting-edge, best-of-breed, go-to ideated words designed to leverage and incentivize and synergize the living daylights out of the current paradigm.

If I had a nickel for every time I saw text trashed with jargon like that, I would be writing this from a penthouse in Monaco, wearing slippers made from hundred-dollar bills.

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Jargon is like cholesterol—there's a good kind and a bad kind. Sometimes jargon and buzzwords can signal belonging: You understand your audience, and you are using insider terms familiar to them. That's the good kind.

But too often we use the bad kind of jargon. We rely on it as lazy shorthand. Or to mask incompetence or insecurity. Or because we think it's the language of business, especially if a company sells to other businesses rather than to consumers.

No business truly sells to another business; we all sell to people.

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Jargon and buzzwords are the chemical additives of content: You can use them from time to time. One or two used sparingly might help. But add too many of them and the whole thing becomes toxic.

I'm an optimist. I believe that most of us try to avoid buzzword bloat. We want to be understood. We want in our heart of hearts to sidestep nonwords and clichés and jargon.

Better writing comes from that place of goodness. It means using the best words, choosing real words, and avoiding the temptation of buzzwords.