A client sent us a biography that had already been drafted in-house: a founder described as 'a visionary leader,' a company called 'award-winning' and 'renowned throughout the industry.' Every word checked out. The founder held real awards. The company was genuinely well known among its peers. The reviewer declined the draft anyway, citing tone.
This confuses people more than almost anything else in the process. They expect Wikipedia to argue with their facts. Instead it argued with their adjectives — and the facts were never really the problem.
Wikipedia calls this class of language 'peacock terms': words that assert a subject's importance instead of letting evidence establish it. 'Visionary,' 'award-winning,' 'renowned,' 'leading,' 'world-class' — none of these are lies, exactly. They are judgments, offered without the reader being shown how the writer arrived at them. An encyclopedia does not ask to be trusted on judgment. It asks to be checked.
Use facts and attribution to demonstrate that a subject's importance is real, rather than telling the reader it is.
The fix is not to soften the adjective. It is to delete it and put the fact in its place. 'Award-winning' becomes the name of the award, the year, the body that granted it, and a citation. 'Renowned throughout the industry' becomes a sentence describing what the industry coverage actually said, attributed to the outlets that said it. The praise disappears. What it was standing in for does not.
Clients often worry this will make the page sound flat, even unflattering by comparison to the version they wrote. It rarely does. A named award with a date reads as more substantial than the word 'award-winning' ever did, precisely because it can be checked in one click. Readers, like reviewers, tend to trust the sentence that shows its work over the one that asks to be believed.
We now read every draft adjective by adjective before it goes anywhere near a reviewer, and ask the same question of each one: what fact is standing behind this word, and is it cited? If the answer is no, the word goes — not because it is false, but because an encyclopedia has no use for praise it cannot attribute.
