"This really resonates with me."
Said alone, in a design review or a piece of peer feedback, that sentence gives the other person almost nothing to work with. It's not wrong — it's just weak, and it's weak for a specific, nameable reason.
Resonate names an effect without naming a reason, which makes it one of the easiest words in business English to use as content-free positive filler, or as an audience-response claim with no evidence behind it. This is the most professionally consequential risk the word carries, and it shows up in two closely related ways.
Two faces of the same risk
The first: resonate used alone, with no stated reason, reads as low-effort, non-actionable input in peer feedback, design reviews, or retrospectives. This really resonates with me tells a teammate that something landed, but not what, or why — which means they learn almost nothing about what to keep or repeat. This resonated with several of our engineers because it named the on-call burden directly tells them exactly what worked.
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Start learning for free →The second: claiming something resonates with a customer segment, department, or "everyone" without research, behavior, or another defensible basis overstates what a subjective, audience-specific effect can guarantee. Three interviews don't support this resonates with our customers; no sample at all supports with everyone. The calibrated version — this resonated with several of the customers we interviewed — makes the same underlying claim honestly, matched to its actual scope.
A related discipline belongs here too: when a message fails to resonate, keep the message as the subject that failed, not the audience. Our customers failed to resonate with the campaign quietly shifts blame onto the audience; the campaign failed to resonate with our customers keeps the failure where it actually belongs. None of this means avoiding resonate — it means never letting it stand alone as a verdict, and never letting its audience claim outrun the evidence behind it.
Practice scenarios
Practice using resonate in situations like:
- turning an unelaborated 'this really resonates' comment into specific, actionable design-review feedback
- matching an audience-resonance claim to the actual sample size or evidence behind it
- rewriting a person-blame sentence so the message, not the audience, stays the grammatical subject that failed
Useful practice phrases:
- "This resonated with several of our engineers because it named the on-call burden directly."
- "This resonated with several of the customers we interviewed — not with 'everyone.'"
- "The campaign failed to resonate with our customers, not the other way around."
A verdict without a reason is an opinion. A verdict with a reason is feedback someone can actually use.
The gap between the two is one sentence, and it's the sentence that separates precise use of this word from marketing filler.
Lyra Practice helps advanced non-native English professionals learn the nuance of high-value workplace expressions and practice using them in realistic scenarios, so their English sounds natural, precise, and senior at work. Try Lyra Practice.