Adjectives Describing Performance: The Good, The Bad and The Lazy

About a year ago, in an article for The Huffington Post, These Words Are So Overused They’ve Become Meaningless, Claire Fallon included amazing and awesome on the list of words that no longer have any impact.

That’s as true now as it was then but, if anything, they seem to have gathered steam!  And their continued use and overuse has an even more serious consequence:  As habit-forming, easy-to-reach descriptors people can grab and use on the fly without much thought, they’re crowding out other adjectives that could really do the job adjectives are meant to do: Describe, give more info about, quantify and qualify the nouns they’re paired up with.

“Justin did an amazing job with the testing project” tells us that whoever is reporting generally wants to give Justin a shout-out about his work, but that’s about it.  Was it on-time?  Did he use resources well?  Did he resolve some conflicts that could have derailed the whole effort?  Did he give appropriate and timely feedback to other participants?  Amazing compared to what?  How does his work compare with Ashley’s, whose performance was described as awesome?  What kinds of changes would move his contributions to epic status?

Today’s business communications have to be short, direct and to the point, but it’s just as important that they tell the story we want to tell, and not be susceptible to multiple interpretations.

For certain words to lose their impact is annoying.  But it’s downright hazardous to good business results when they become handy, go-to substitutes for first-string, clear, concise and unequivocal descriptors that help associates see and understand clearly the results of their actions.