Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Lake Superior State University on New Year's Eve released its its 42nd annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." The university collects nominations all year round on this Facebook pageand releases the word to honor the new year. The word cloud is from the university, showing some of the previously banned words. Previous lists and more information about the project may be found here.

The 2017 list and the reasons given by the university:

You, Sir:  Hails from a more civilized era when duels were the likely outcome of disagreements. Today, we suffer on-line trolls and Internet shaming.

Focus: Good word, but overused when concentrate or look at would work fine. See 1983's banishment of, We Must Focus Our Attention.

Bête Noire: After consulting a listing of synonyms, we gather this to be a bugbear, pet peeve, bug-boo, pain, or pest to our nominators....

Your headline is the first contact with your content, and must grab your target audiences’ attention. At this point you have no control – the reader does. They either click the link to your content or they don’t. The job of the content creator is to make sure that they choose the first option, and read and share your carefully crafted content.

How much time do you spend coming up with a killer title? Reading stats like this one by Copyblogger should make you sit up and take notice.“

On average 8 out of 10 people will read your headline but only 2 out of ten will read the rest of your content.”....