Avoid using these words/phrases in your blog at all costs
Thanks to Brendon for the chance to publish something today on Slacker Manager. My name is TDavid and you can find me posting regularly at Things That … Make You Go Hmm where the post below has been sitting in the draft bin patiently waiting for the right time and place to make an appearance.
As someone who reads hundreds and sometimes scans thousands of blog posts a day, I see worn, overused words and phrases just like you do. Outside of coding something to strip out the presence of these words in my RSS reader so I’d never have to see them, I thought it would be in the spirit of Professor Strunk to prepare a list to words to avoid in no particular order and at the end offer you the opportunity to add to the list: The do not use word/phrase list
- after the jump [break, bump, etc.]. God, please just omit these needless words! We can see there is a break, so why restate the obvious? Some offenders: Valleywag, Lifehacker, New World Notes and too many more.
- web 2.0. This one arrived DOA. There is no web 2.0, so get past it and just avoid using it altogether. Some current offenders: just Google them, they’re everywhere. Despite regular counseling I’m even guilty of this offense.
- labeling anything new a “__ killer.” Jeremy Wright had a good rant on this one. It’s absurd to declare any new product or service a “killer” anything until at least some history has developed to justify the hyperbole. Hey, I can get with hyperbole, but the “killer” stuff has gotten way out of hand and must be, well, killed.
I bet you can list more below, so come on, let’s have them.
And don’t forget your paragraph breaks, unlike me above, too :)
How about “Avoid using these words/phrases in your blog at all costs”?
I’ve worked at newspapers for many years and a colleague and I used to collect awful phrases from press releases that writers should never use. The one we hated the most? “For young and old alike.” Please don’t use that on your blog.
… or even : “Avoid using these words/phrases in your blog at any cost”! ;^)
Whatever you’re writing I’d add to avoid the words excellence, tier 1, and world class – they’re all meaningless until defined. Also, it’s regardless, not irregrardless :-)
To be fair “after the jump” is perfect when you’re ending with a YouTube video, where readers can’t tell anything is there :)
If you’re ending with a video, then there is no “after” Jeremy.
?
If I end with a YouTube video in the post, it won’t show up in feed readers, but will show up on the blog. So “after the jump” is a decent way of telling people who might not know that therer’s more to the content than they might be seeing.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you :-)
In that example I’m still missing where it is relevant to us “after the ___.” This expression is usually overused to describe that there is more text where the reader needs to click a link (usually denoted with elipses or “more” or something like that) to see the rest of the text, not to end with a video or other non-text.
There would be nothing after the bump (the video in your example) there would only be the material they aren’t seeing. And there is no “after” that for anything if it’s the end of the post.
However, you do raise a valid point about the need to identify when you are embedding some other material that might not show in RSS readers. I always try to say something like “in the video above (below)” or maybe even put [video] in the title or reference the video is embedded in some way in the text. This way readers know to look for this non-text content if it’s not showing in their RSS reader.
Sounds like personal preference to me T :)
Yeah, I’m not against the jump announcements either, provided that they actually provide readers with the basis for making a decision on whether to continue.
“Three more videos after the jump”, for instance, is more useful than “read more after the jump”.
One word: musings.