Mule has an internal list of words we do not use. It is short, and most of it sounds harmless at first. We refuse the words because they read as agency-speak to the people we want to win: small-business owners who run on plain English and a tight margin.
Here is the current list and what we say instead.
1. Leverage
We do not leverage anything. We use it, build on it, or borrow from it. "Leverage" was a finance term that crept into consulting decks in the 1990s and never left. Anytime we read it in a draft, we replace it with "use" and the sentence gets shorter and the meaning gets clearer.
2. Supercharge
Nothing on a small-business website has ever been supercharged. We make things faster, sharper, or better. The supercharge word is a tell that the writer ran out of ideas at the headline stage.
3. Frictionless
This one is the most common offender in B2B and SaaS copy. Nothing is frictionless except a hockey rink. We say "easy," "fewer steps," or "no signup required." Each of those is concrete and falsifiable.
4. Unlock
We do not unlock potential. We do not unlock value. We do not unlock anything. We help businesses make something work better, or earn more, or take less time. If you cannot say what you actually mean without the word "unlock," you have not finished writing.
5. Activate
"Activate your audience" is a sentence that has done more harm to the marketing profession than any other. We do not activate people. We give them something useful, or true, or funny, and they respond or do not. The verb pretends the audience is a battery, which is corrosive to the relationship.
6. Delight
"Customer delight" is a word that exists almost exclusively in dashboards. Real customers do not feel delight when their HVAC company calls them back inside an hour. They feel relief. They feel respected. They feel like the call was worth making. None of those are delight. We say what we mean.
7. Empower
We do not empower clients. Clients have power; they have a business, they have money, they have the right to fire us. We help them, we advise them, we ship work for them. The empowerment word implies we are giving them something they did not already have, which is condescending.
What this is about
Voice. Every word that hides instead of says burns a small amount of trust with the reader. Over a thousand-word page that adds up. Over a homepage, an about page, a services page, and three blog posts, the difference is the difference between a customer who reads to the bottom and one who leaves at scroll two.
The list is not finished. We add to it whenever a phrase shows up in a draft that we have to translate to plain English. If you have a candidate, send it to us. We will probably agree.