These Days, Your Writing Sucks

We give out a lot of free advertising advice on this blog. It’s mostly because we like making ourselves sound smart and, thus, feel important. We are a vain, gross group of people. (But don’t let that put you off if you’re a potential client. Our vanity is rooted in deep-seated insecurity, which forces us to constantly keep creating better and better content in order to see ROI for, and get praise from, our clients so that we can reassure ourselves that we are, in fact, awesome. It’s a vicious, never-ending cycle, but it’s great for you!)

So we could use this time right now to spitball about SEO strategy or why we’re the best of the advertising agencies in Austin. Or maybe about why lead gen marketing is an important new aspect of digital marketing. Perhaps we could explain why you need to hire Rock Candy Media as a branding agency. Other buzzwords! Etc.!

But you know what the internet loves? A m*****f****** list. So here’s an incomplete list of phrases that make us want to go and burn down a children’s hospital out of pure anger every time we see them lead off a business’s blog, email, ad, article, and so on.

If any of these appear in your marketing material, we suggest you advise the person who wrote those words to take up a non-language related career immediately.

– These days
– There’s nothing worse than
– Everybody/Everyone knows
– No one can seem to agree
– One thing everyone agrees on
– It goes without saying [immediately followed by the thing that was supposed to go without saying]
– Conventional wisdom tells us
– In times like these
– In this day and age
– In this day in age (this is worse because it means they’re a bad writer AND dumb)
– Let’s talk about
– We all know
– Anyway,
– I/we hate to say it, but
– Sorry if there are any typos, I wrote this very drunk.

If you want your content to sound like that, we recommend making like McDonald’s and paying machines to do people’s jobs. We’re sure Google has some sort of mediocre content program in the works. If you want your content to sound like an interesting human wrote it, however, then hire an interesting human to write it.