Cut every adjective you cannot defend

Strong writing shows, weak writing labels. The fastest way to spot a thin story is to count its adjectives. When the facts are strong, the writer can simply lay them out and let the reader draw the obvious conclusion. When the facts are thin, the writer reaches for words like shocking, historic, and devastating to manufacture a feeling the reporting did not earn.

Adjectives that tell the reader how to feel are a form of instruction, and readers resist being instructed. Call something shocking and a reader instinctively decides whether to agree. Show them the fact that is genuinely shocking and they arrive at the feeling on their own, which means they own it. The emotion a reader reaches themselves is far stronger than the one you tried to assign them.

Take the test on your own drafts: for every adjective, ask whether you can defend it with a fact in the same story. If you call a policy controversial, does the piece show the controversy, the people on each side, the actual dispute. If you call a number huge, does the story give the comparison that proves it. An adjective you can back with evidence can stay. An adjective standing in for evidence has to go.

The worst offenders are the intensifiers that have been used so often they have gone hollow. Unprecedented, historic, dramatic, and stunning once meant something and now mean almost nothing, because everything gets called them. When a reader meets these words they feel the writer pressing on the scale, and the effect is the opposite of what was intended. The claim shrinks rather than grows.

Verbs do the work that adjectives pretend to do. "Prices rose sharply" is weaker than "prices doubled in three months." The first tells the reader it was a lot. The second shows them, and lets them feel the weight. Whenever you catch yourself propping up a flat verb with an adjective or adverb, look for the stronger verb or the concrete fact underneath, and use that instead.

Concrete nouns beat decorative adjectives almost every time. "A large crowd" is vague. "Around four thousand people, filling the square and spilling into the side streets" is a picture. The reader does not need you to characterize the scene for them, they need you to give them enough specific detail to see it. Detail is trusted. Characterization is questioned.

Adjectives of judgment are especially dangerous in news, because they smuggle in the writer opinion under the cover of description. Words like brave, reckless, sensible, and extreme are verdicts dressed as facts. If a person acted in a way some would call reckless, report the action and, if it matters, report who calls it reckless and why. Do not render the verdict yourself in a stray adjective.

This does not mean stripping all color from your writing. A well chosen adjective, used sparingly, can be precise and vivid. The problem is not the existence of adjectives, it is the reflex of reaching for them to inflate weak material. A single exact adjective earns its place. A pile of vague, emotional ones announces that the writer did not trust the facts to carry the story.

Adverbs deserve the same suspicion, and often more. "He completely denied the allegation" is not stronger than "he denied the allegation," it is just longer, and the completely quietly editorializes. Many adverbs are the writer leaning on the reader, insisting on an emphasis the sentence does not need. Cut them and the sentence almost always stands taller.

Watch for the adjectives you did not consciously choose, the ones that arrive out of habit. Every field has its automatic modifiers, the sweeping reform, the embattled leader, the beleaguered industry. These pairings feel natural because you have read them a thousand times, which is exactly why they should make you pause. A phrase that writes itself is a phrase that is not thinking.

Editing for adjectives is one of the highest value passes you can make on a draft. Go through the piece with a single question, does this word earn its place with evidence, and delete every one that fails. The story that remains will be shorter, plainer, and noticeably stronger, because everything that is left is doing real work rather than performing emphasis.

The deeper point is about trust between you and the reader. Every time you tell a reader how to feel, you signal a small doubt that the facts can do it themselves. Every time you simply show them the fact and step back, you signal confidence, and confidence is contagious. Cut the adjectives you cannot defend, and what remains is a story that trusts its material, and a reader who trusts you.