Your Friendly Neighborhood Copyeditor Presents: Say “Hurt” When You Mean “Hurt”
You’ve been hurt in your life, haven’t you? We all have. But I’m willing to bet you’ve never been negatively impacted, because that’s not a real thing, that’s just some syllables people use to clutter up their writing. And when you use words not to convey meaning but to avoid saying what you mean, you’re not merely being untidy. You are telling the reader you’re not trustworthy, because to say one thing and mean another is the definition of untrustworthiness. So why should the reader listen to you at all?
This is mostly a business writing problem, and the business writing people are set in their ways and unlikely to listen to me, but occasionally negatively impacted (or the only slightly less objectionable negatively affected) slips its tether and tries to get into other kinds of writing. Don’t let it! You’ve heard me say it before: More words don’t make you sound smarter! They just give the reader more time to realize you sound dumb!
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