The Anti-Corporate Style Guide: Words to Ban (delve, leverage, seamless)

You can spot an unedited AI draft in one sentence. It delves. It leverages. Everything is seamless, robust, and elevated. None of it sounds like a person, which means none of it sounds like your brand.

The fix is not "write it all by hand." The fix is a style guide with teeth: a short ban list, a few hard requirements, and a check that runs on every draft.

The ban list

Start with the words that mark text as machine-written or committee-approved:

• delve — nobody delves; people look into things
• leverage (as a verb) — you use things
• seamless — if it were seamless you would not need to say so
• elevate / unlock / empower — motivational-poster verbs
• robust / cutting-edge / best-in-class — claims that carry no information
• "in today's fast-paced world" — and every opener like it

The test for adding a word: would your best writer say it across the table? If not, it goes on the list.

Require contractions

"Do not" instead of "don't" is the fastest way to sound like a legal notice. Contractions are how people actually talk, so a draft without them reads distant even when the words are right. Make them mandatory, not optional.

Three edits that de-slop any draft

• Cut the throat-clearing: delete the first sentence if the second one works without it.
• Swap abstractions for specifics: "improves performance" becomes the number, the channel, or the example.
• Read it aloud: anywhere you stumble, a person would too.

Automate the guardrail

A style guide in a PDF gets read once. A style guide enforced on every draft changes what ships. Savra bakes this into the Brand Genome: the ban list, the contraction rule, and your own learned patterns run as a check before anything goes out, on the blog, on social, in email, everywhere.

See how it works in Content & Copy, or audit your current voice first and count how many banned words you find.