The word that did not need help

The hoardings around a new housing development on a road in Riyadh compete in adjectives. Truly exceptional living. The very finest finishes. A completely exclusive community. Genuinely authentic design.

Each extra word is there because someone worried that the plain one was not enough. It almost always makes things worse.

"Authentic" already means real. "Genuinely authentic" tells the reader the writer was not quite sure. "The finest" is a claim; "the very finest" is a raised voice, and a raised voice is what people use when they suspect nobody is listening.

The same thing happens in ordinary speech. Someone who says they are really, truly sorry is often less convincing than someone who simply says sorry. A friend who calls a film honestly incredible has given us two words to doubt instead of one.

Amplifiers feel like insurance. They behave more like a tax. Each one costs a little of the reader's trust, and each one makes the next claim need even more help. Before long the whole road is shouting, and the one development that simply says what it is, plainly and without decoration, becomes the one people actually read.

There is a test I find useful. Take the sentence and remove every word whose only job is to make another word louder. If what is left is true, it was strong enough already. If what is left is weak, no adverb was going to rescue it.

Plain words carry more weight than people expect, and the strongest version of a sentence is usually the shorter one.