Renowned. Leading. Award-winning. Cutting-edge. Draft biographies tend to arrive with two or three of these packed into the opening lines, and an experienced reviewer deletes most of them before finishing the paragraph — often without reading whatever citation sits at the end of the sentence.
The reason has nothing to do with modesty. Wikipedia's style guidance calls these peacock terms: words that assert importance instead of demonstrating it. A fact can be checked against a source. 'Reported revenue of forty million dollars in the year ending March 2024' can be traced to a filing and confirmed true or false. 'Leading' cannot. Leading compared to whom, by what measure, according to which count? The adjective asks the reader to accept a ranking that no citation in the article actually performs.
Reviewers read the pattern before they read the prose. A biography opening with three unearned superlatives reads less like an encyclopedia entry and more like a press release dropped into the wrong template, and that first impression shapes how closely everything after it gets checked. An article that starts loud tends to get read for tone as much as for sourcing — which slows down a case that might otherwise have cleared review on its facts alone.
The fix is mechanical once it's visible. 'A leading provider of enterprise software' becomes 'a software company that reported forty million dollars in revenue last year, according to its regulatory filing.' 'An award-winning documentary' becomes 'winner of the 2023 [name] award.' The adjective disappears; the sentence grows a little longer and considerably harder to argue with, because it now carries a fact instead of a claim.
Instead of making unprovable proclamations about a subject's importance, use facts and specific achievements to demonstrate that importance.
None of this makes an article duller. It makes it more defensible. A ranking, an award, a valuation, a circulation figure — each can be contested the ordinary way facts are contested: someone asks for the source and gets an answer. 'Renowned' cannot be sourced. It can only be repeated, by the subject or by whoever wrote the draft.
The habit is worth keeping past the review stage. A page written in the plain, sourced register tends to survive years of editing untouched; nobody proposes a merge over a sentence that only states what a citation already proved.
