Giles and Parscale owned two of the more ambitious Web-design businesses in town, and the merger allowed them to focus on their respective strengths: Giles made everything look good, and Parscale made everything work on the back end.

The offending word is – of course – respective. It adds nothing to most sentences. Even worse, respective makes your writing pompous and old-fashioned. Most of the time you should fight the urge to add respective to something you’ve written.