Weasel Words

A weasel is a sneaky creature that feeds on other animals’ eggs by sucking out the contents and leaving the shell intact. It lends its name to so-called weasel words that do the same thing to your writing, removing the substance and leaving nothing but an impressive-sounding shell.

Politicians are masters of weaseling out, adding meaningless word-like sounds that appear to inform but only evade – what The Political Dictionary calls “the politician’s way of covering up uncomfortable secrets.”

My favorite: “If I offended anyone, I apologize.” It contains the word “apology” so it gives the impression that the speaker seeks forgiveness. But it begins with a refusal to even acknowledge that any offense was given.

We writers often commit similar sins, hedging our statements with lazy attributions like “some people say,” “experts assert” and “research shows.”

What people? What experts? What research?

I’ll come clean on this one. Back at my college newspaper, we used to joke that we could make a controversial declaration and credit it to “observers” because “We’re observers, aren’t we?”

More insidious than coverups are the everyday equivocations we use because we lack confidence in our statements or due to sheer laziness.

We try to pump up the statement with bland phrasing like “actually,” “basically” and “at the end of the day.”

We're unwilling to take a side so we hedge with “that depends on how you look at it."

We're too lazy to find a source for our facts so we turn to our good old reliably anonymous "experts” or the people who” say."

Want your message to not suck? Keep the weasel words away from the golden eggs your writing could be.