Cleaning copy

Most bad copy isn't badly written. It's copy that shouldn't be on the screen. Editing it for tone just makes the wrong thing read better. So the first question is never "how should this be phrased" — it's should this exist.

The ladder

Walk a string down these in order. Stop at the first one that fires and delete.

1. Does this need to surface at all? Is the thing being described something the user would ever have wondered about, unprompted? If they'd never have thought to ask, you're not answering a question — you're planting one. Nobody opens an avatar cropper wondering whether the circle is a true circle. A caption reading "the preview is rendered at the exact size used on your profile" makes them wonder whether it might not be.