Longhand · words
Nine words that make every Indian brand sound the same.
None of them is wrong. All of them are load-bearing in sentences that would collapse without them, which is the problem.
we banned these in our own writing. ask us how it went.
Every one of these turns up because the writer did not have a fact, and a big word feels safer than a small silence. Here they are, with what they are covering for.
1. Seamless
Means: we hope nothing breaks. Nobody has ever described a good experience to a friend as seamless. Instead: say what does not happen. “You don't have to call us to change a booking.”
2. Robust
Borrowed from engineering to make a spreadsheet sound structural. Instead: a number. “Survived eleven lakh requests in a day” is robust; “robust” is a shrug.
3. Bespoke
A Savile Row word for a tailor who measured you. Used now for anything with a dropdown. Instead: “made for you”, if it is, and nothing if it isn't.
4. Curated
Means: we chose some. Museums curate. A shop with forty products has a selection, and there is no shame in that word. Instead: say who chose and why. “Nine kinds, picked by the person who roasts them.”
5. Passionate
The most common word on Indian About pages and the least visible in the work. Passion is a thing people notice about you, not a thing you announce. Instead: show the obsessive detail. “We proofread seven times. We still find one.”
6. Synergy
Two things next to each other, described by someone who does not know what either does. Instead: name the two things and what happens when they meet.
7. Disrupt
Retired hurt. If the word appears near your product, the reader now assumes the product is an app that delivers something slightly faster. Instead: say what you changed and who was annoyed by it.
8. Solutions
The great Indian noun. Content solutions, HR solutions, packaging solutions, total solutions. It exists so that one company can appear to do everything, which is exactly why the reader learns nothing. Instead: the actual thing. “We write websites.” “We print boxes.”
9. “We don't just X, we Y”
Not a word, a shape, and the most infectious sentence in Indian marketing. We don't just build websites, we build experiences. We don't just serve coffee, we serve conversations. It promises a bigger idea and delivers a bigger claim. Instead: keep the X, and prove it. “We build websites. Yours will load in under two seconds on mobile data.”
Why this happens, and it isn't laziness
Big words are what you reach for when nobody has given you a fact. The fix is usually not a better writer, it is a better brief.
Ask the founder one question, “what do you do that a competitor would find annoying to copy?”, and the answer is always concrete: we answer in a day, we refuse rush jobs, we make the chutney every morning, our engineer has been here nine years. None of those sentences needs a single word from this list. They need somebody to write them down.
The test
Take your homepage, delete all nine, and read what survives. If a paragraph vanishes entirely, you have found your real writing problem, and it was never vocabulary. That's a brief problem, or a voice problem, and both are fixable in an afternoon.
Our own banned list is longer than nine, and it is written down, because a rule you can't point at isn't a rule.