English - Hedging & boosting
- Hedging - soften, show caution, politeness, or limited evidence - may, might, could, appear to, seem, suggests, possible, likely, tend to, passive voice - These finds may indicate model drift
- Boosting - show confidence, stress importance - clearly, obviously, undoubtedly, demonstrate, show, certainly, significantly, in fact - The results clearly demonstrate a 20% latency cut
Mini-Cheat guide
- Model Verbs - might/may (hedge) - will/must (boost)
- Reporting Verbs - suggests/indicate (hedge) - proves/demonstrates (boost)
- Adverbs - possibly/likely (hedge) - clearly/significantly (boost)
- Adjectives - potential/apparent (hedge) - definitive/crucial (boost)
- Quantifiers - some/a proportion (hedge) - the majority/all (boost)
Table
- may/might/could - forecasts, polite criticism - “Latency may increase under load”
- likely/apparently - partial evidence - “It is likely a parsing bug”
- significantly/clearly - strong, numeric evidence - “Throughput clearly rose 15%”
- undoubtedly/certainly - rock-solid fact - “Memory leaks will certainly crash the service”
One sentence can mix both, hedge and boost Example: "Although the patch appears to reduce CPU usage, long-term savings are significant"
