Effective communication: As a matter of fact, at the end of the day, it’s a foregone conclusion...

It’s easy to poke fun at street lingo; words such as “like”, “yeah”, “y’know” are completely over-used in most sentences. Yet we all have our favourite phrases, words or clichés that we repeat too often and don’t even notice.

If you use these in a presentation, or worse still, a piece of written text, you are almost guaranteed to turn off the audience.

Some will get fixated on the phrase and start to count how many times you use it, while others will stop listening because it irritates them.

If you are not sure if you have a phrase or word that fits into this category ask your closest friends – they are bound to know. Then make sure you concentrate on ridding the offending words from your vocabulary.