I recently saw this post on Twitter, I can’t recall where from!
It was a post detailing 6 words you should remove from your professional vocabulary.
I saw this post and mostly agreed. The particular word that jumped out to me is “just”. In this post, they say;
It also packs a big punch to detract from your credibility and confidence and negates from the importance of your message.
Although this wasn’t what I thought. For me, saying just implies a simplicity that some people might not have, even at different levels of software development - but not exclusively, this simplicity could be implied in any context.
“Just do this small thing” implies it must be easy. Maybe it is for you, but is it to the person you’re talking to?
The rest of the words they discuss didn’t appeal to me quite as much. I agree to some extent, but my pain is with the ambiguous, “subject” words, such as it, this and that.
I often find it clearer to remove the ambiguity and just say the subject itself. Instead of “could you do that?” - what is that? Is it X or is it Y? Say “could you do X?”