That little statement underneath your organization’s name has to be powerful and to the point.

By Richard Deveau

At that point, someone else in the audience, a creative director, said that she also tells her writers to find other words for taglines when they present her with those ending with “ing.”

I personally think it depends on the word. I wrote a tagline for a client a while ago that read, “Help. Hope. Healing.” I just don’t think “Heal” works as well in this case. In the examples I gave earlier for the fictitious homeless shelter, one of the taglines I proposed has two words ending with “ing” — “renewing” and “restoring.” I believe these words also lose impact if you remove the “ing.” The words “renew” and “restore” in this case seem flat and less active.