A former boss of mine, back in the day, once gave me a nugget of advice that was like a sticky note affixed to my career ever since. The advice came as he reviewed a document I intended to take to the company CEO, summarizing the results of a major project. The boss said, "you need to avoid adjectives and adverbs."
His advice centered on the need for facts, the avoidance of hyperbole and that, in his experience, adjectives and adverbs were words that jumped off of a page as red flags to those in C-suite jobs. In his opinion, which I grudgingly understood and eventually adopted, adjectives and adverbs became props for covering the truth - for trying to turn what actually were average results or expectations into something special.
I lost touch with that boss but have thought of him often over the past several days as I listen to our President. Here's hoping that advice I've used so often doesn't become irrelevant in our Presidential administration's new world order of language.
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