I’ve decided what my New Year’s resolution for work is going to be.

I’m going to try to eliminate the word “engaging” from my vocabulary, especially
in client presentations.

It won’t be easy—“engaging” is basically the adman’s equivalent of saying “um” or
“like…”

It’s a meaningless word that we use interchangeably and unconsciously
to mean things like “good” or “successful” or “interesting” or “looks nice” or
“people will like this”, things which everyone in our business says about
everything they do, even though most of it is the opposite of good or interesting,
and won’t be remotely successful.

In a nutshell, what “engaging” really means is, “this sucks”.

In presentations, “engaging” is a verbal crutch, an all-purpose adjective
used indiscriminately to describe anything. Have you gone out on a rhetorical limb
that is clearly starting to unravel as you ramble off on a tangent?
Just end your sentence with the word “engaging”, take a breath, and move on.

I can only imagine what it’s like to be a client and spend all day having agency people
tell you how “engaging” their work is.

So, it’s going to be hard & I don’t know if I’ll quite be able to quit cold turkey,
but “engaging”, you are going away in 2011.