Why we need to banish the word ‘should’

Words are the lifeblood of marketers and corporate communicators, yet seldom do we reflect on the positive or negative power that a single word can have on our audience.

Yes, there are plenty of words that scholars and social researchers advise marketers to avoid. For example, the word very rarely adds anything useful to a sentence. Among the hundreds of writing pundits who advise not using very, inbound marketing HubSpot’s Niti Shah says the word has no business being said out loud.

Here’s another: Time magazine suggests that the word hope implies a lack of planning and to delete it entirely from your entrepreneurial vocabulary.

The word I want to focus on in this post is should.

I’ve been trying to eliminate should from my lexicon in communicating with co-workers, clients, journalists—anyone, actually. It’s a lesson I learned from a former co-worker and friend who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.