Superlative with nothing to compare

unqualified-superlativeon by defaultJapanese / English

A superlative such as "the fastest" with nothing to compare it against

Example

Flagged

Our new product is the fastest on the market, with unmatched quality and unparalleled ease of use.

What chaff prints

1:1 "the fastest" has nothing to compare against (3 such claims) 1:1 "unmatched" has nothing to compare against (3 such claims) 1:1 "unparalleled" has nothing to compare against (3 such claims)

Fixed

Our new product processes orders a fifth faster than the previous model.

What chaff prints

no finding

How to fix

Name the comparison. "The fastest of the three options we tried."

Why it matters

"The fastest" without saying than what leaves the reader nothing to check.

What it does not flag

A superlative with its comparison or scope in the same sentence ("in our range", "than last year", "the fastest in the industry") is not reported, nor is one limited by a clause ("the best we have measured"), nor one inside quotation marks, which are someone else's words, nor one inside a set phrase ("even the best", "in the best case").

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)

Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)

npx chaffjs relax unqualified-superlative --why "reason"

Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)

rules: unqualified-superlative: off

Technical details

Layer: L2
Status: stable
Severity: warning
Languages: Japanese and English
Suited to: business, blog, 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	reported once there are 1 such claims
normal	reported once there are 2 such claims
relaxed	reported once there are 4 such claims

By genre

Runs by default in: blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, academic/paper, speech/address
Turned off by the genre in: legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/transcript
Not suited to, and not run in: technical/spec, technical/readme

Genres

Message

"{matched}" has nothing to compare against ({count} such claims)

Sources

Femmer et al. (2017)

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