Most of the copy we delete in client work is not bad. It is generic. It would describe a competitor as accurately as it describes the client. That is the failure mode worth caring about.
The specificity test
Take any paragraph of marketing copy and ask: could a direct competitor sign the bottom of this? If the answer is yes, the paragraph is not doing work.
The words we cut most often are the ones that sound the most “professional” — solutions, leverage, empower, ecosystem, end-to-end. They sound like work but they are the opposite of work. They are the white noise we use to fill the space between the things we have not yet figured out how to say.
What replaces them
Concrete nouns. Verbs with edges. Numbers when you have them. The name of the thing you actually do, in language the person paying for it would use.
The rewrite is usually not subtle. The paragraph gets shorter. The reader gets faster. The competitor stops being able to sign it.