Intensifiers, don’t
31 July 2009 / Michael
Intensifiers are adverbs intended to strengthen adjectives.
For example, writing ‘very unfair’ instead of ‘unfair’ should suggest that whatever you are referring to is more than ordinarily unfair. Similarly, you might write ‘extremely unfair’ or ‘astonishingly unfair’.
Unfortunately, due to a quirk of human psychology, this does not work. It actually has the reverse affect. To a reader sentences like:
Their behaviour was extremely unreasonable.
That was very unfair.
I was tremendously upset.
Are less convincing and less strong than:
Their behaviour was unreasonable.
That was unfair.
I was upset.
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I lost track of the number of times I told my pupils this. It is spot on advice, and even now I still proofread my own stuff to take the offensive words out.
I agree. Although it sometimes becomes an unconscious habit as you’ve programmed yourself to think that intensifiers somehow have more of an impact (shamelessly incorrect, though!)
Obviously I’m in the minority here! Okay, so there’s no real difference from “unfair” and “very unfair” but, for me, the latter examples almost seem apologetic! If someone told me they were upset then I’d assume that there wasn’t anything particularly wrong. If they said they were very upset I would take more notice!