Should Never Be Used In Business Writing

Words That Tank Your Credibility Before You Even Start

I spent about eight years writing client proposals, internal memos, and executive summaries before I realized most business writing problems aren't structural. They're vocabulary problems. There's a whole category of corporate filler that people use without thinking because they've heard it everywhere, and it slowly destroys the quality of whatever document they're producing. The list of things Should Never Be Used In Business Writing is shorter than most people think, but the damage each word does is disproportionate to how harmless it looks on paper. Here's what actually matters, organized by the type of damage they cause rather than some arbitrary alphabetical list.

Jargon-Heavy Buzzwords

Words like synergize, leverage, circle back, drill down, and deep dive are the first things that go out. Not because they're technically wrong, but because they signal that the writer is reaching for something impressive instead of something clear. When I was managing a team of six junior consultants, I once had three of them submit a single strategy memo that contained twelve uses of leverage in under four hundred words. The client asked me directly what leverage meant in that context. None of them could answer. The fix is brutal but simple: if you can't replace a buzzword with a plain English verb that does the same job in fewer syllables, you're probably padding the sentence for no reason. Synergize becomes work together. Leverage becomes use or apply. Circle back becomes follow up. These substitutions don't make your writing feel less professional. They make it readable, which is what actually signals professionalism.

Intensifiers and Hedging Language

This category is sneakier because it often appears in good faith. Words like very, really, quite, slightly, somewhat, and just sit between you and your point like a fog. They dilute statements that should be direct. I learned this the hard way when drafting a budget justification last year that included phrases like "we would slightly like to recommend" and "the projected savings are quite significant." My director cut the entire paragraph and rewrote it in three sentences that made the actual ask without any of the hedging. The recommendation went through faster than anything we'd submitted in months. Hedging language also includes softening openers like just, only, and I think. "I just wanted to check" reads as insecure. "I wanted to check" reads as intentional. The difference matters more than people give it credit for, especially in written form where tone is already stripped away.

Dead Phrases and Clichés

At your earliest convenience, per my previous email, touching base, think outside the box, low-hanging fruit, and move the needle belong in fiction, not business documents. When I read "per my previous email," I immediately assume the writer is frustrated and wants to signal it without being direct about it. That's not how you build a reputation for clarity. There's a specific edge case with dead phrases that people miss: they embed themselves in templates and then spread. A company template that says "please find attached herewith" doesn't get corrected because nobody reads it critically anymore. I found a template like this being used across four different departments in one organization. It took me about twenty minutes to audit the shared drive, flag every instance, and replace them with straightforward language like "attached is" or "see attached." That one cleanup improved document quality across every team using those templates.

Overly Formal or Archaic Terms

Herein, hereby, pursuant to, aforementioned, and notwithstanding sound like they belong in a legal brief, which they mostly do. Most business writing isn't a legal brief. Using these terms in an internal report or a client update creates distance between you and your reader. It also tends to make sentences longer without adding precision. I once reviewed a vendor proposal that opened with "Pursuant to our earlier discussion regarding the aforementioned deliverables, we hereby submit the following..." That was one sentence. It could have been "Following up on our conversation about the deliverables, here's what we're proposing:" and a busy executive would have understood it faster and retained more of the actual content.

Vague Quantifiers

Say what you mean. If a metric improved, say by how much. If revenue grew, state the figure. Words like significant, considerable, substantial, and various are red flags in business writing because they usually mean the writer doesn't have the specific data or doesn't think the reader needs it. Both are problems. During a quarterly review I facilitated, someone wrote that customer satisfaction had "improved considerably" over the past year. The actual NPS score had moved from 41 to 44. That's a three-point gain. "Considerably" made it sound like a breakthrough. The real number told a more complicated story and deserved the more accurate description. Specific numbers also let people fact-check you. Vague language doesn't.

The One Exception Nobody Talks About

Some of these words have legitimate uses in specific contexts. Legal agreements absolutely should use herein and pursuant to. Industry-specific technical documentation might require certain jargon that your audience expects. The rule isn't that these words are always wrong. The rule is that you need to be able to justify their use consciously rather than dropping them in because they're habit. If you're writing a contract, use precise legal terminology. If you're writing an email to your project manager about timelines, don't. The mistake most people make is treating business writing as one register when it's actually several, and the wrong register for the context is what makes even competent writers look amateurish. The practical test I use now is whether removing the word changes the meaning. If "very" disappears and the sentence still communicates the same thing, it shouldn't be there. If "leverage" is replaced with "use" and nobody blinks, it was never doing heavy lifting. Applied consistently, this approach cuts the word count of most drafts by roughly thirty percent while making the remaining content substantially easier to parse.