Our written world would be much less rich without
adjectives. They put the paint on the walls of the picture in our mind’s eye,
fill the imagined scene with a diversity of vivid sounds and scents, and give
substance to the movie that plays out in our heads when we read or listen to
words produced by others. In short, they describe
the world, enabling us to sense it by proxy when we don’t sense it directly.
Consider the following sentence from P.G. Wodehouse’s novel Thank You, Jeeves, in which Sir Roderick
Glossop describes an alarming encounter with what turns out to be a monkey on
the stairs of the Dower House at the fictional Chuffnell Hall:
“I had scarcely reached the stairs when I observed a hideous form. A little, short, broad, bow-legged individual with long arms and a short, wizened face.”
This concise sentence paints for the reader a very clear and
distinctive picture of whoever – or indeed whatever
– it was that Sir Roderick came across on the stairs. Stripped of its
adjectives though, all we’d learn from the sentence is that Sir Roderick
encountered an individual that had arms and a face (as indeed the majority of
individuals tend to have).
‘Good’ adjectives and
‘bad’ adjectives?
For the purposes of this short blog post, I’ll divide adjectives
into two broad categories – ‘functional’ and ‘hyperbolic’ – and consider the
respective effects of adjectives falling into each category when they’re used in
the context of a research proposal.
Functional adjectives can be used to provide helpful or
essential information to the reader. In describing this blog post as ‘short’,
for example, I’m letting the reader know early on what they can expect –
reassuring them that I’m not asking for too much of their time while managing any
expectations that it might keep them occupied for the whole of their Penzance to
Edinburgh train journey. Okay, ‘short’ is somewhat subjective – my short might
be your lengthy when it comes to blog posts, for example – but if you’re one of
my regular readers then at least we can establish that this post is a bit less
lengthy than my usual monthly ramblings.
But what if I’d said ‘this amazing blog post’? Just by using a different type of adjective, I
would have made a highly-subjective claim with which you might very well
disagree. And whether you disagreed or not, you’d be well within your rights to
want to decide for yourself whether it’s really an amazing post. By using
hyperbole – hyping my blog in the hope that I’ll convince you to read it – I
may well have annoyed you and put you off it altogether. You’d quite likely now
be looking for grounds to refute my highly-questionable ‘amazing’ claim.
I’ve never actually seen anyone claim in writing that their
proposed research project is amazing. But I do quite commonly encounter
adjectives that may, to a greater or lesser extent, fall into my ‘hyperbolic’
category. Research methods are often described by those who have devised them as
‘novel’, for example, while areas of unmet clinical need are quite commonly held
out to be ‘major’. These seemingly-innocuous descriptive words might however prompt
the terse reviewer to remark that “I’ll be the judge of that!” Too much hype
and not enough evidence to support it may start to raise suspicions that your
claims are over-inflated. The title of this post misquotes Shakespeare’s Queen
Gertrude – Hamlet’s mother – who feels that a character in a play she’s
watching is trying too hard to convince, and in doing so is undermining her own
credibility.
In their corporate guide to writing clearly,
the National Centre for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has the following to
say under the heading ‘Unnecessary adjectives’:
“Adjectives and adverbs (describing words) are subjective, can dilute your meaning and add to your word count.”
In a previous blog post,
I made the case – with a little help from Nature
journal’s writing-style guide for authors – that clear, plain-language writing
such as is advocated by NICE will always improve a research proposal. So, are
‘novel’ and ‘major’ really examples of unnecessary adjectives?
What if I were to write about an illness that has no cure
and is suffered by almost 5 million people in the UK and over 450 million
people worldwide, causing over 500 premature deaths each week in the UK alone
where a new diagnosis is made every two minutes on average? The condition
causes complications that lead in the UK to 170 amputations, over 500 heart
attacks and almost 700 strokes every week. In these two quite lengthy sentences
I have used just two adjectives – both of them functional (‘premature’ and ‘new’).
Do I really need to add in words like ‘major’, ‘significant’ and ‘considerable’
to underscore the severity of this public-health problem, or do the facts and
figures render such adjectives redundant? If your research is addressing an
important problem of some sort, have confidence
in the facts as you present them and in your reader’s ability to interpret
them. The condition, by the way, is diabetes.
The other example I gave, involving the use of ‘novel’, is
perhaps a graver offence in a research proposal. Consider the following
sentence: “This novel proposal will fill current gaps in understanding of the
infection biology of Salmonella enterica.”
The use of ‘novel’ here represents a completely unsubstantiated claim – how do
we know the proposal is novel, and in
what ways does it fit that description? Better to spell all of this out for the
reader, and let them come to their own conclusion that your project includes
some exciting new features and approaches. Describe those novel aspects,
explaining what makes them different from what has gone before and perhaps
pointing out how your own review of the published literature supports this
contention. If your claims are accurate and backed up by the facts, then once
again they should speak for themselves.
De-cluttering your
text
Anyone who ever reads or listens to what I have to say on
the subject of bid writing will know that I'm pretty evangelical about the use
of plain language – keeping text
clear and clean, uncluttered by anything that might detract from the meaning
you wish to convey to the reader. Hyperbolic adjectives are a good example of
the kind of unnecessary clutter that you should always look to cut out. In her
book The Winning Bid: A practical guide
to successful bid management, the author Emma Jaques echoes my enthusiasm
for plain, uncluttered language:
“Use plain English when creating your text. In reality, this means using short sentences and writing in straightforward language that even the layperson can understand ... Try to avoid jargon, unnecessary adjectives (things like ‘really unique’), padding or fancy words...”
Going all-in on the
adjective hate!
If I’ve prompted you look more closely at something you
might be doing more or less unconsciously when you write, then you may be
interested to take a look at this polemic article,
which only half-jokingly makes the case against using adjectives in pretty much
all forms of writing. In the article,
the author – a professional writer and editor – quotes from Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to
Staying Out of the Rejection Pile and lists six key reasons why manuscripts
are badly compromised by heavy reliance on adjectives and adverbs:
- less is more
- assuming that the reader can’t see what you want them to see is to underestimate them
- writers should always make the reader use their imagination
- the most overused adjectives and adverbs are common words that don’t add much
- adjectives and adverbs often don’t pack as much power as you might think
- excessive use makes for unnecessary slow reading
OK, so point four does look rather similar to point five from
where I’m sitting. But with the exception of making readers use their
imagination – fine for fiction and creative writing, maybe not so helpful in a research
proposal, where we don’t want reviewers to do too much in the way of imagining
or thinking for themselves – I reckon the above points apply as much to a research-funding
bid as they might to a novel.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.
