All rules

Empty intensifier

empty-intensifieron by defaultJapanese / English

Words like "extremely important" that add weight without saying what matters

Example

Flagged
It is important to note that the deadline is Friday.
What chaff prints
1:1 "it is important to note that" emphasises without saying anything
Fixed
The deadline is Friday; a late delivery pushes payment into next month.
What chaff prints
no finding

How to fix

Say what matters and why. If you cannot, the sentence can go.

Why it matters

"Extremely important" does not say what matters or why. It only feels emphatic.

What it does not flag

Only the phrases on chaff's list are checked; whether a reason follows is not read. A Japanese statement of necessity (不可欠です, 欠かせません) that names its purpose in the same sentence (〜のためには) states a condition and is not reported.

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)
<!-- stet: empty-intensifier — reason -->
Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)
npx chaffjs relax empty-intensifier --why "reason"
Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)
rules: empty-intensifier: off
Technical details
Layer
L2
Status
stable
Severity
warning
Languages
Japanese and English
Suited to
blog, business, technical, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech

Levels

Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).

strictreported once there are 1
normalreported once there are 1
relaxedreported once there are 3

By genre

Runs by default in
technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper, speech/address
Turned off by the genre in
literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/transcript

Genres

Message

"{matched}" emphasises without saying anything

Rewrite depth (chaff fix-plan --depth): light — words and sentences; the structure and the voice stay

This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/empty-intensifier.yaml