As a UX Writer, I spend a lot of my time experimenting with voice and tone in writing.

Often, when I’m tasked with writing copy for a specific user flow, I’ll also be sent across brand guidelines, copywriting style guides and examples of text from the marketing team. This all helps give me a clear idea of the voice, and the brand’s unique personality that should shine through in all contexts whether marketing or deep within the user journey.

This is different from the tone. If the voice is the personality, the tone is the mood. For example, if I’m writing an error message, I imagine the user would feel frustrated. Depending on the context for the error, choosing a playful tone might just annoy them further and give them a negative impression of your product (unless you’re Slack, in which case if my error message isn’t playful, I’m going to be feeling all kinds of disappointed). A more serious and direct tone might be more appropriate.

What does this have to do with 5 phrases that I find annoying? Well, overused phrases become clichés, and the more users read them, the less of an impact they have.

A lot of the time, such overused words become overused in the first place because they are excellent at conveying a specific voice. But when it goes too far? I’d argue that they have the opposite effect. Rather than injecting your copy with personality, they can make it sound weak and familiar, meaning your voice is lost (hence my ramble about what voice means at the beginning).

And for more highly-strung users who have the patience of a tired toddler on a sugar-free detox like me, they can elicit reactions of disproportionate annoyance, increased blood pressure, and a lot of general huffing and puffing. (Yes, this is a disclaimer that this list is based on my personal opinion, and also I tend to be a smidge dramatic when it comes to reacting to words).

And another disclaimer — I’m not stating which companies my examples are from in most cases, nor am I out to shame these companies. Every writer and company has examples of overused language, so it’s purely to illustrate contexts.

Without further ado, here are some words that I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot everywhere and read as clichés in my mind. I’d love to hear any phrases you’ve had the same reaction to!

SOMETHING SOMETHING VIBES ✨🍃🌟🤞

Let’s kick off by me thoroughly showing my age. What even actually is a vibe? Why do I automatically say “thank you” when people send me vibes on WhatsApp? Do vibes contain calories? Can a vibe be a bad thing? Are vibes deeply ironic and only taken seriously by a minority of vibe-less individuals?

I prefer my vibes shaken, lightly salted, and caffeinated tbh.

I lied. I’m not a stranger to vibes. I have been known on occasion to send strangers on Twitter good vibes when they say nice things about my Medium posts, for example. However, “vibes” are bloody everywhere.

I had a look on Google Trends to see if it’s possible to pinpoint the start of the “vibes” movement, and it seems possible:

Shout out to all those vibing in 2004, OGs.

I’m not sure what happened in 2015 that caused the upward spike (indeed nothing good at all seems to have happened in 2015…), but vibes have been around long before, and the meaning has remained consistent.

The examples above are all taken from emails from a range of brands ranging from work to lifestyle and groceries, and in each case, it’s clear “vibes” is a more playful and arguably slightly more tangible way of expressing some sort of feeling.

But when you think about it, what’s being expressed here? It’s something hard to express. However, “vibes” feels like a cop-out. If your desired voice is “vague”, then by all means go for it, but it’s time to try putting those feelings in other words.

Otherwise, in 10 years, we’re going to have entirely replaced all feelings of any kind with the word vibes, and that’s going to go like this:

Got some new shoes today, total new shoe vibes. But it’s raining outside, rainy day vibes. Maybe I’ll just stay home tonight and get a Dominos, pricey pizza vibes for rainy evening vibes. Oh, and I need to try and fix my toilet later, send plumbing vibes. And can you believe it someone just tried to call me who even does that anymore Vodafone vibes am I right.

I also enjoy this take on “vibes”, written shortly after the 2015 “vibes” boom.

NO EMPLOYEES, JUST ROCKSTARS 🎸

Yes, this is a bandwagon, and I am jumping on board because I keep seeing “rockstar” everywhere. It began with start-ups and tech companies over-using it in job descriptions.

At some point, someone decided that “rockstar” is an acceptable synonym for “the best”, thus “hiring the best” became “hiring rockstars”, and “we need someone very talented to join our company and we can’t pay that much but you need to eat, sleep, live, breathe and sneeze our brand” became “we need a rockstar”.

And then it started bleeding out of job ads into general job vocabulary. Here are some headlines from professional publications and job posts (and yes, I didn’t blank out “Internwise” as a company in that second because it’s worryingly common to label unpaid internships as “rockstar” positions and that is absolutely not OK. In fact, bad vibes to any company labelling unpaid internships as “rockstars”).

What if I’m more of a pop star singer-songwriter than a rockstar 😢

From an employee branding perspective, “rockstar” was probably intended to make positions sound more exciting. And the trouble is, if your position needs words like “rockstar” to sound more exciting, it sounds insincere. And if it sounds insincere, you lose credibility and end up putting off professionals who may otherwise have been interested.

Words like “rockstar” and its cousins “ninja” and “hacker” may be putting off whole groups of people, i.e. women and minority groups.

For job titles, surely the title is enough, and for other cases, why do we need to go beyond “better than good, rockstar levels of good”.

In my past job as a Product Manager, I remember listening to a talk from some other PMs talking about how to be a Product Rockstar, describing some vague set of soft skills that wouldn’t traditionally be associated with rockstars, at least not in my opinion.

What do you think of when you hear “rockstar”? For me, I think of Tina Turner. Icon, but I don’t see her particularly enjoying the process of prioritising a backlog in Jira with over 2000 tickets, some inexplicably dating back to before Jira was even a thing.

For some companies, “rockstar” has become a word for an idealised employee, fitting their own definitions, e.g.

You regularly sell out large arenas to people who pay to listen to your music and then trash a hotel room after.

Why not consider how you want to come across as a company, and focus on descriptions that are sincere, authentic, and not potentially offputting to more than 60% of the population? And in case you’re interested, read more on the issue with “rockstar” in job adverts specifically here.

WHERE? AT YOUR FINGERTIPS 👐

Full transparency: this phrase made the list when I realised I had used it several many times in one flow for a client. Searching around, I realised it’s become pretty ubiquitous, especially in marketing comms.

Is it just me or is the word “fingertips” starting to make you uncomfortable?

There’s something unsettlingly physical about the phrase “at your fingertips”, but it might be my personal propensity to take language very literally. What’s at my fingertips right now? My credit report, apparently. And the world’s best dishes. And the world of music, radio and podcasts. And EVERYTHING. *hyperventilates*

When I went back to edit the text I had written, I realised I defaulted to “at your fingertips” whenever I wanted to describe how easy something was, or what opportunities it would afford the user, and it had become a crutch for making these things simple to write about. It’s not always easy to articulate the true value to the user behind something, but just like with “vibes”, “at your fingertips” starts to be vague.

And more than that, it seems to often be used in combination with other classic clichés, such as in the last example shown above. “Everything’s all in one place, at your fingertips.” Normally, I would just scan through this and not really read this, as it’s familiar and clichéd, but reading in detail, is this not the same sentiment repeated twice?

In tHeSe UnPreceDeNted TiMes

Yes, Covid-19 was world-changing and perspective-shifting and generally traumatic. Was it unprecedented? There are arguments on both sides. Some say no, as humanity has experienced pandemics before, such as the Spanish Flu pandemic at the beginning of the 20th century. Some say yes because the context for this pandemic is a world in which there’s more mobility and a higher proportion of people living in urban areas.

Regardless, one thing was a certainty in 2020 — that you’d read the word “unprecedented” at least 23 times a day.

I need someone to make a Chrome extension that replaced the word “unprecedented” with the word “sh*t”.

Certainly in 2020, things were unprecedented. And especially in an email situation, it felt odd to say the cursory “I hope you’re keeping well” without specifying “in these unprecedented times” because it felt like you were ignoring the sky basically falling and society collapsing.

And while there have certainly been a bunch of other terrible unprecedented world events since 2020, we need to stop and ask:

In a time where everything is unprecedented, is anything actually therefore truly unprecedented?

Whereas before, “unprecedented” because part of the vocabulary of writing with an empathetic and aware voice, it has quickly fallen into the realm of cliché.

GOTTA HUSTLE

Come closer, because I need to tell you something and I don’t want others to hear. OK, I’m going to whisper this.

2 years ago, I started a side-hustle. I started moonlighting and spending every evening after work consulting as a Product Manager and UX Writer. And then last year, I quit my 9–5 and made my 5–9 my new 9–5, and my side-hustle became my main hustle.

What’s alarming to me now is the sheer amount of times I read this exact thing from others every single day, and how suddenly everyone a) needs to have a side hustle and make it massively successful and earn 6 figures from it and b) is writing about side hustles as a side hustle (my brain hurts).

If you say “hustle” ten times in a row, it stops sounding like a real word.

When did everything suddenly become a hustle? Back in the day, I sweat hustle used to mean swindling people out of money or doing something a little illicit and shady. Suddenly, it feels like anything you do outside of your main source of income is a hustle.

I read this article about the true meaning of hustle, and it was a bit of an “aha” moment. Kirstyn LaRee says:

“It’s time to call it what it is — a business.”

Now tone-wise, I think people (coughGaryVcough) started talking about “hustling” because it sounds exciting. Something different, not ordinary, something you put passion into, something you put energy into for a big payoff at some point.

However, with the amount we talk about hustling nowadays, it’s become a pressured thing. I mean, in the examples above, watercolour painting is conflated with hustling. It’s gone too far, and it’s all too pressured.

“Hobby”, “passion project”, “consulting”, “freelance work”, or even “side business” may not sound quite as sexy or energetic, and lack that same feeling of movement as is implied by the word “hustle”, but they’re much more accurate, less pressured, and don’t run the risk of carrying the same negative connotations as “hustle”.

Which clichéd phrases get your blood boiling?

This is my list, and writing this was also a reminder to myself to try and avoid relying on buzzwords and clichés in writing or to add personality to text. If you want to learn more, check out this article on how these kinds of words and phrases can lose resonance over time (and guess which word is top of their “stop using this” list for 2020).

And in the meantime, I’ll be hustling to send you unprecedented rockstar vibes at your fingertips. Runs away screaming and crying. ✨