Too much hedging
excessive-hedgingon by defaultJapanese / English
Hedges piled up ("it may perhaps be possible") until nobody is saying anything
Example
How to fix
Commit where you can. Where you cannot, say what you would need to know. Where hedges are stacked, keep one or drop them all and commit.
Why it matters
The more the text avoids claiming, the less the reader can tell what was decided. One hedge is caution; many mean nobody is accountable. chaff looks two ways. A sentence that stacks hedges ("may possibly", "it could perhaps be argued") is reported on its own, even in a short document. Too many hedges across the whole document is measured only on longer documents. When counting hedges stacked in a sentence, a hedge inside a quotation is the speaker's, not the writer's, and is left out.
What it does not flag
A single hedge is caution and is not reported. A hedge inside a quotation is the speaker's, not the writer's, and is not counted.
Turning it off or relaxing it
Technical details
- Layer
- L2
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- warning
- Languages
- Japanese and English
- Suited to
- business, blog, 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).
| strict | up to 3 hedges per 1000 words (hedges stacked in one sentence are reported whatever the length) |
|---|---|
| normal | up to 6 hedges per 1000 words (hedges stacked in one sentence are reported whatever the length) |
| relaxed | up to 12 hedges per 1000 words (hedges stacked in one sentence are reported whatever the length) |
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, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, speech/address
- Turned off by the genre in
- legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, academic/paper, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/transcript
Message
"{matched}" and other hedges: {density} per 1000 words (limit {limit})
This sentence stacks {count} hedges ("{matched}")
Rewrite depth (chaff fix-plan --depth): light — words and sentences; the structure and the voice stay
Sources
This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/excessive-hedging.yaml