‘Said’ is not a rude word

If you want to say in a witness statement that someone said something, just say that they said it.

Those who draft witness statements often get hung up on this – possibly because they have been taught that it is bad style to keep using the same word in a piece of writing. There is something in that rule, but you have to use your judgment (and your ear) about when to follow it. In particular, it simply doesn’t apply to ‘said.’ The reader won’t notice ‘said’ any more than ‘the’, ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘has’ etc – it doesn’t hook the attention, but just imperceptibly feeds the reader some information about who was speaking. On the other hand, if you keep repeating ‘confirmed’ or ‘indicated’ in your statement, it will sound very wooden.

So avoid the following expressions, and similar:

‘Expressed that,’ which is clumsy, and grammatically dubious – you normally express something: admiration, disapproval, a wish, an objection etc.

‘Indicated,’ which provides less clarity than ‘said’ in an extra 3 syllables. ‘Mary Jane indicated that she did not like rice pudding’ does not tell us whether whether she said politely, ‘I won’t thanks, I’ve never liked rice pudding,’ or pulled a face, or took a spoonful and then spat it out – or lay on the floor kicking and screaming.

‘Verbally indicated,’ which uses the 4 syllables of ‘indicated’ to introduce unnecessary uncertainty about how it was indicated; and then takes another 3 syllables (‘verbally’) to clear up that uncertainty.

‘Confirmed,’ which is fine if what you mean is that the speaker made definite something that had previously appeared uncertain; but otherwise ‘said’ is more accurate.

‘Shared,’ because it won’t help your case to make the tribunal feel queasy.