Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 3/Achieving NPOV

Now at a more granular level: the actual sentences, the actual words. Here are some principal flaws to avoid. You want to avoid "puffery". Puffery is a fancy word liked on English Wikipedia, that just means exaggerated praise. Exaggerated praise or promotional language. And we saw some examples of that in the first text, about Tiwa Savage. You remember: "iconic", "legendary", "great", "celebrated", "famous", "renowned", "cutting edge". These are all words of praise that do not belong with Wikipedia's Voice.

Wikipedia does not consider anyone or anything "legendary". You can quote someone saying that someone is legendary, but when you write and you are embodying Wikipedia's Voice -- when you write in an article, you *are* Wikipedia's voice! -- you never think anyone or anything is legendary or iconic or famous. Even "famous" -- to whom? Right? Most people who are famous in Ghana are unknown in China, right? So, the encyclopedia should not use these adjectives almost ever.

The second thing we want to avoid is *emotive language*: Language that is designed to arouse feelings in the reader. Adjectives like "horrible", "wonderful", "exciting". Now, this is language that you will find all over journalistic writing! When you read the news, people will describe a "horrible" massacre or a "wonderful" new resort for vacations, or "in an exciting development, the game turned around and they scored three goals". This is the kind of emotive language that a newspaper might use to keep the reader engaged, to keep the reader interested.

It's a perfectly legitimate literary technique, but it doesn't belong on the encyclopedia. The *encyclopedia* does not think anything is horrible or wonderful or exciting or surprising. Of course *we*, the readers, personally may think the massacre was horrible, the game was exciting; but *the encyclopedia does not*. So that is something to avoid. Emotive language.

The other thing to avoid is *editorializing*. And editorializing means that you share an opinion about what you are reporting, like a newspaper editor commenting on the news. Again, you will find this often in magazines or journalistic writing: saying something was "surprising" or, "interestingly...", or "obviously, ...", or "unfortunately". These are essentially little signals to the reader: "Hey, this is interesting. You should be interested!" Or "unfortunately" -- "you should be sad about this. This is a negative thing." Right? These are little emotional cues. It's also a kind of emotive language. But really it's like dictating to the reader how they should feel about the facts that we are reporting. And the *encyclopedia* shouldn't do it. Don't tell me what is obvious and what isn't. And also, again, that's relative, right? What may be obvious to you may not be obvious to me. What may be surprising to you may not be surprising to someone who has been paying attention. What what may be interesting to one person may not be interesting to another. So it's not neutral and not encyclopedic to use these words.

Now, some of you may think, wow, I have been using these words even when writing on Wikipedia. Indeed! That's what I'm saying: Wikipedia's Voice is a particular mode of expression that isn't natural. It's not natural for us humans to speak in neutral point of view! It's a *skill* that we have to develop. It's a particular voice we have to attune to, to kind of set our faculties to, that mode when we write sentences on the encyclopedia. The rest of the time, we can use all these words, but in the encyclopedia we should not.

And finally, avoid giving grades, as we've seen. Avoid saying something was "the best" or "the worst". Almost ever. There's almost never a reason for the encyclopedia to say that something was the best or the worst, although in very specific and, again, measurable cases, you could, for example, say that "this athlete's best time at the 100 meter dash was nine seconds." That's an objective thing, right? There was a measurement of that best time of the running, so you can say that's an objective fact. That was the best time *of that athlete*. So again, I'm encouraging you to understand the *principle*, and not to remember in a robotic way "Asaf said we must never, ever use the word 'best'". That's not what I said. I said avoid giving grades. But if you are reporting a fact like the best time an athlete achieved, that's okay.