Weasel words

You can become a better writer almost immediately by learning to identify and replace “weasel words.”

Weasel words are words (or phrases) that seem to convey clear meaning but upon closer inspection offer no real substance, like:

• “business outcomes”

• “experts believe”

• “analyzing data”

• “make a decision”

We use weasel words to hide gaps in our knowledge. They are often subconscious crutches that sound so coherent and fitting that we don’t recognise them for the hollow, empty phrases they really are.

But in almost all cases, writing can be made vastly more persuasive and helpful by deleting these words and replacing them with a simple list of the actual concrete processes they are acting as placeholders for:

• “analyzing data” -> “looking for outliers in monthly traffic performance”, “creating cohorts to track performance across authors and topics”, “comparing recent monthly performance to historical benchmarks from last year”

Weasel words proliferate because finding these concrete processes is hard and time-consuming, requiring the writer to conduct more research or introspect more deeply. But it is precisely these concrete, tangible actions that provide the most value to a reader trying to understand a concept or learn a process.