Are Wasted Words Stopping You From Revealing Who You Are?

by Philip Twyman · September 22, 2026

The Line That Made Me Stop Reading

I read a lot of other people’s marketing emails, probably more than I should. Lately I keep noticing the same handful of words turning up everywhere. Passionate. Proven. Life changing.

None of those words are untrue exactly. They are just worn out from overuse, and worn out words do not make anybody believe you.

If you are writing to people who tell you ‘I need to change my life style finacialy’, or ‘how can I start to earn an extra income’, those big, tired words are not what reaches them. Believable words are, and that is the phrase worth holding onto as you read the rest of this.

That is what this article is about, and it starts with a small, exact number rather than a big promise.

Why These Words Have Stopped Working

Here is the plain truth about words like passionate, proven and life changing. The more often they get used, the less anybody trusts them.

Your reader has read those words a hundred times before, from a hundred different people, most of whom never delivered on them. So the words stopped meaning anything, and your reader learned to scroll straight past.

What they are looking for is something believable: a specific detail nobody else would think to mention, a small, real figure, a plain fact instead of a big claim.

Picture two emails landing in the same inbox on the same morning. One says, this proven system changed my life. The other says, I made $12.50 in April, then $27.50 a few weeks later. The second one is smaller, plainer, and far easier to believe, because it could not have been copied from anybody else’s website. These are believable words, not borrowed ones.

Tired words do not make anybody believe you.

I have found this myself, both in other articles I have shared recently and in my own inbox. The emails I open are the ones telling me something specific, not the ones telling me something big.

What Happened When I Got Specific

In February 2025 I started a direct mail campaign promoting a free trial package by my mentor, Nick James. I had no big claim to make, and I was new to all of it, and I knew it.

Then in April that year, my first payment came through: $12.50. A bit later, a second one arrived for $27.50.

It does not sound like much, written down like that. But those two small, exact figures did more for me than any promise of life changing income ever could. They were true, and I could point straight at them.

That was my own result, not a promise of what anybody else might see. It was individual to me, not a guarantee of what anybody else would find, but it was the moment I believed this could work.

If you do not try, you will get what you have always got. I still think about that whenever I am tempted to write something bigger sounding instead of something true.

The One Question I Ask Before I Write Anything Now

Before I send anything to my own list these days, I ask myself one plain question. Could this sentence sit on anybody else’s website without anyone noticing?

If the answer is yes, it is probably one of the tired words. Passionate. Proven. Life changing, with nothing specific behind it.

Fifty one years of hairdressing taught me something that still applies here. If a client wanted a colour or a style, I would sit and talk it through with them properly, so I got it right, rather than assuming I already knew what they wanted.

Writing to your own readers works the same way. Listen to what they say, in their own words, and answer that, rather than reaching for the phrase everyone else already used this week.

The Trade You Can Make Today

You do not need a research department to do this. You need one honest swap.

Take one email, one page, or one post you were about to send out. Find the word or phrase that could belong to anybody. Passionate. Proven. Life changing.

Then replace it with something only you could say, plainly and without exaggeration. Not a bigger promise, a smaller, truer one.

Instead of telling your reader you are passionate about helping them, tell them the one thing you did this week to help somebody. Instead of promising a proven system, tell them the two exact numbers that made you believe it yourself.

Your reader is 45 and up, comfortable enough for now. They worry about what happens if they cannot work, or what their pension will stretch to. They have heard the big words already; what they have not heard enough of is somebody being specific with them, using believable words instead of borrowed ones.

Try this test on your own last email. Read it back and ask which sentence a stranger could have written about any product at all. That sentence is the one to cut. Replace it with the one detail that is unmistakably yours, even if it is as small as two figures on a bank statement.

Where This Leads

Getting specific matters most in the emails you send your own list, because that is where trust is built or lost, one message at a time.

If writing those emails is the part that frightens you, you are not alone. I remember how much writing itself scared me when I started, even though I could chat to anyone without a second thought.

Moving my own email system across to eShowcase threw me right out of my comfort zone too, and I am still getting a little better at it each day.

Nick James put together something called Lazy Way To Email Riches, built around getting a simple email system working. It does not require you to be a natural writer. If specific, believable words feel like the missing piece for you too, it may be worth a look.