Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

36Avoid These Mistakes Marketers Make

I've been editing marketing and PR professionals and other business executives for nearly 20 years, mostly at ClickZ and now at MarketingProfs. I just did the math, and at a rate of an article a day that's something like 4,000 pieces of content.

That makes me sound like a bit of a relic. But really what it does is make me pretty familiar with common writing problems that plague marketers and other business professionals. Too often they sacrifice clarity on the altar of sounding professional (with fuzzy thinking, wordiness, conformity, clichés, taking a running start…and other things I've talked about in this section and in Part I).

A while ago, I (along with MarketingProfs Director of Publications Vahe Habeshian) started keeping a list of the more common transgressions. Here are the top 17 followed by their anti-wordiness, anti-fuzzy thinking, pro-brevity, pro-clarity equivalents:

1. Ways by which = Ways
2. Continues to be = Remains
3. In order to = To (especially at the beginning of a sentence)
4. There (are) will be times when = Sometimes, At times
5. Despite the fact that = Although, Though
6. At which time = When
7. In spite of = Despite
8. When in comes to = In, When
9. The majority of = Most
10. A number of = Some, Few, Several, Various (or eliminate entirely)
11. When asked = Asked
12. Leverage (as verb) = Use (or Put to Use), Harness, Apply,
13. The same level of = As much
14. While (if not being used to mean during or at the same time as) = Although or Though, Whereas
15. Moving ...