How to Pollute Your Résumé with Adjectives
How to Pollute Your Résumé with Adjectives
Part 1 in a series about the practice of "show, don't tell"
Have you ever read this line on a résumé:
I am a hard-working, intelligent employee with broad industry experience.
Or encountered this on a dating profile:
I’m a down to earth, laid-back kind of guy/gal who loves to have fun.
Or a real estate listing that touts:
Stunning 2-bedroom home located on a beautiful street tucked away in the heart of a fabulous neighborhood with great schools nearby!
Or an academic paper crowned by the following abstract:
This paper presents a novel method for science-ing the stochastic ostentations of loquacious sesquipedalians by utilizing a linear distance analyzer. Results are remarkably similar to theoretical predictions and show significant improvement over previous formulations by Eruditus Inferiorus, et al. The work presented herein has profound implications for future studies of the socioeconomic gestalt.
In each of these examples, here’s what the preponderance of adjectives is really saying about the person, product, or service being advertised:
I don’t have any compelling value propositions, so I decided to fill the void with positive-sounding adjectives and hoped you wouldn’t notice.
Imagine that you received a nicely-wrapped present, which turned out to be completely empty when you opened it. That’s exactly how it feels to read a sales pitch for a whole lot of nothing, wrapped nicely in adjectives.
(“Sales pitch” and “value proposition” are loosely defined in this article as anything competing for our attention, money, or a desirable position).
Demonstrate, Do Not Explicate
Show, don’t tell.
Actions speak louder than words.
Talk is cheap.
These proverbs would be cliché if they weren’t so incontrovertibly true. Adjectives, by nature, are descriptors: cheap words that tell and explicate. Accomplishments, on the other hand, are expensive demonstrations of actions. Adjectives are hypothetical claims; accomplishments are empirical evidence. If the intrinsic desirability of the person, product, or service can be demonstrated, then adjectives were unnecessary to begin with.
Adherence to via negativa (“less is more”) is one of the core principles of Adventures in Leadership Land. When reading a sales pitch, we consider adjectives to be pollution. At best, adjectives slightly enhance the intrinsic value of the person, product, or service being showcased, at the cost of succinctness1. At worst, adjectives can obfuscate the worthlessness of the goods being peddled.
The “Too Many Adjectives” Heuristic
We’re big fans of heuristics (mental shortcuts). Here’s one:
The density of adjectives in a sales pitch is inversely proportional to the quality of the goods.
The “Too Many Adjectives” heuristic will guard you against false positive (Type I) errors, but make you susceptible to false negative (Type II) errors. Occasionally, you’ll find a person, product, or service that’s really good, but whoever wrote the sales pitch stuffed it with fluffy adjectives like some kind of marketing taxidermist. If you used the “Too Many Adjectives” heuristic, you would remove a great candidate from consideration.
Although false positive errors are much more common than false negatives, you wouldn’t want to take mental shortcuts when making a high-impact decision. Therefore, we recommend that you use this heuristic like a piece of adjective-resistant armor, but don’t outsource your decision-making to it.
Accomplishments Show, Adjectives Tell
How would each of the sales pitches at the beginning "show, not tell”?
The hardworking, intelligent employee’s résumé would highlight the time they worked an 80-hour week to deliver the goods for a demanding client, a contribution that saved millions of dollars for the organization, or a turnaround strategy that brought a struggling division back to profitability.
Bonus: a portfolio of noteworthy work and commendations.
The down to earth, laid-back, fun-loving person would saturate their dating profile with photos of travel or other leisurely activities and write a description of their typical low-key Friday night.
Bonus: link to their gamer profile with unlocked achievements on full display.
The real estate listing would simply mention the 2-acre corner lot, hardwood floors, granite countertops, and the school system’s national rankings and standardized test scores.
Bonus: several photoshopped images of the view (preferably taken during golden hour).
The academic paper would simply say “we discovered the cure for cancer, a method to travel faster than light, and the correct way to load a dishwasher.”
Bonus: The best way to demonstrate the value of one's research is, paradoxically, to not publish a paper about it. Only worthless discoveries require ornamental adjectives to get the authors published in a journal with a decent impact factor. If the authors had truly unraveled the mysteries of the universe, they would hoard those secrets until they can be sold for fame and fortune.2
A Poem about B.S. Detection
To help you remember these points, we composed a quatrain for the next time you evaluate a sales pitch:
If the numbers of facts are low
and the tally of adjectives high,
this person has nothing to show
then it’s time to tell them “good-bye.”
We hope the “Too Many Adjectives” heuristic helps you dodge disappointment and doubt the next time you’re selecting a person, product, or service.
In the next post, we’ll dive even deeper into the “show, don’t tell” paradigm by covering some claims that must never be used for self-aggrandizement. They are so fragile that the act of making the claim will undermine its legitimacy.
Some examples of adjectives enhancing something that is intrinsically desirable: An Ivy League diploma, rather than a generic degree. Italian marble rather than just plain marble. This is common when selling a commodity product. All commodities are inherently valuable; otherwise, no one would bother to sell them. However, the difficulty in differentiating one commodity from another means that you can’t charge more than a competitor offering the same thing. The overuse of adjectives is an attempt to differentiate the product and charge a higher price.
A sales pitch that advertises a complex product (e.g. skilled worker, esoteric product or service) should use adjectives sparingly. Otherwise, it’s signaling that what’s being sold is an undifferentiated commodity, thus inviting a rock-bottom price.
To be clear: everything in this article about academic publishing is satire. It’s true that the “publish or perish” culture in academia creates a lot of perverse incentives to game the system, and we will satirize it mercilessly. That said, we are legitimately grateful to researchers who openly share their research results to benefit the public good first, with self-serving motives taking a backseat.