Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 3/Avoiding implication

Next principle of being encyclopedic is how to avoid *implying doubt or truth* when you are reporting something someone said. If you are quoting, if you're bringing someone's opinion and you say "said", "wrote", "commented", "according to", these are neutral ways of bringing a quotation or an opinion. You're literally just saying this was expressed by this person.

But look at this second group of words: "clarified", "found out", "exposed", "insisted", "observed", "claimed", "confessed", "admitted", "speculated". These words are usually *not* neutral. If we say something like "the Prime Minister admitted the government has not been paying pensions", that suggests that until now they have been *hiding* it. Or that they have been denying it until now. It's a non-neutral way of bringing what the Prime Minister said. Or if we say "the Premium Times of Nigeria exposed the fact that the budget is unbalanced", it suggests that it was covered up. And maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. It's a non-neutral way of saying what they reported. Do you see? This is already pretty nuanced, these words. And it takes some skill and practice to weed them out of our writing, especially because we are used to hearing them in journalistic and other writing. But these words are usually not neutral.

I say they're *usually* not neutral because again, context is everything. Don't be robotic in applying these rules. Here are two examples of how you might use "confessed" or "speculated". Look at these sentences:.

"At trial, she confessed to the murder." If we are reporting about some murder trial, And at trial, the defendant confessed to the murder, that's literally what she did. It's a legal action in a trial. That word "confessed" is a fair and factual description of what she did. Right? She confessed in the legal sense. She confessed to the murder. In that case, it is okay to write it in the article about this person who committed a murder.

Here's another example: "Robert Brown" -- he was a scientist -- "Robert Brown *speculated* that molecules cause dust to move in water. Einstein later proved it using statistical analysis." So here we literally describe a scientific hypothesis, a *speculation* by a scientist that he himself would have agreed was a speculation. We are not trying to imply that he didn't know what he was doing or something like that. This is a fair description of that scientific process. He had a scientific hypothesis. He *speculated* that molecules do that. Later, it was scientifically proven.

So these are examples of particular contexts where these words can be used in a neutral, factual way. But usually these words have an overtone of implying either falsehood or truth, which you should avoid. So to be on the safe side, stick to the very neutral, factual, dry words "said", "wrote", "commented", "according to". These are neutral ways to do that.