Clean copy

Most bad copy is not badly written. It is copy that should not be on the screen. Editing it for tone only makes the wrong thing read better. So the first question is never "how should this be phrased". It is: should this exist?

The ladder

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

1. Does this need to surface at all? Would the user ever have wondered about this, unprompted? If not, you are not answering a question. You are 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.

2. Does the label need to exist? A caption earns its place only when the value is meaningless without it. If the label, the field, or the value beside it already says the thing, the caption is noise. A field labelled "Retry limit" does not need "how many times we retry" beneath it. A bare "30" does need "seconds" beside it. That one stays.

3. Is it pre-empting something the user never had to consider? The tell: copy that rules out a failure rather than describing a behaviour.

Cancel upload Always keeps the files already transferred. Never wipes the folder like the old cancel did.