In this video I'd like to explain the terms "hedges" and "boosters." These are
terms that are often used in the fields of rhetoric and linguistics.
I've provided just a sample source here of an article that you can read if you
are interested in this topic, and I've drawn some ideas from this particular
article as well. Hedges and boosters are terms that we use to describe different
levels of confidence in our writing. So if you think of a kind of continuum
of possibility, on the one hand we have statements that we accept as
completely true and we're very sure of them. We don't even question them and
then at the other side of that continuum we have statements where we say well
something is definitely not this or that. We know that something is true or false.
Maybe true and false are not the best terms to use here. We could talk
about statements that are and statements that describe things that are not. In
between we have a whole range of possibility. So if we are just a little
bit sure then we might say something is possible, then we can say something is
probable ... if we're more confident and if we're quite certain (we're not 100%
certain but we're sort of 99% certain) then we can say that something is likely
or certain. Now as we think about this sort of continuum ,hedges tend
to err on the side of caution. We can put them on the right side here.
These are hedges. And then over here we have boosters. And boosters are words
that allow us to sort of up the confidence level, to say that something
is really likely to be true. You can obviously do without hedges or boosters
in your writing, but they allow you to give a certain tone to your writing. They
instill confidence or they suggest that you're very timid or hesitant.
There's a range of possibility in terms of what they do. I've provided a
number of examples here of each, and I'll let you read this yourself, but it's
probably easiest just to look at an example in a second to show
how these things work in practice. Before we do so though I just want to explain
where the term "hedges" comes from. If you are hedging on something, so if you are
not committing yourself or you are avoiding the issue in some ways, then
what that goes back to is literally hiding in a bush, hiding in a hedge.
You're avoiding taking a stance on something and that's where this
term comes from. So maybe that makes it a little bit more realistic or real for
you. Now I had way too much fun here drawing pictures of hesitant and
confident people, but let's have a look at an actual example here. And what we'll
do is we'll go through this [and we'll] suggest some ways in which we can add
both hedges and boosters to this particular set of statements. The first
sentence reads, "At the Battle of Batoche, 800 Canadian soldiers defeated 250 Metis
rebels." That comes across very much as a fact right now, and if we want to tone
that down a little bit by adding some hedges, then we could say something like,
"At the Battle of Batoche (now let's just say 'roughly') ... so roughly 800 Canadian
soldiers or around 800 Canadian soldiers ..." And that makes it seem like we're
not quite as sure, or at least we want to give some benefit of the doubt. If we
want to seem even more confident we can say something like "we know that." So "We
know that at the Battle of Batoche (and so and so on)." The second sentence reads,
"After the battle, the government made Louis Riel the scapegoat." If we want to
seem less confident we could say, "After the battle, it seems that ..."
And we could actually stick this at the beginning of the sentence - which may be
a bit more natural. On the other hand, if we don't want to add a hedge, but we
want to add a booster, we could say something like, "After the battle, the
government clearly made Louis Riel the scapegoat."
So we could say "clearly" (you'll have to read that as
clearly -- it's not very clear!) and that would add quite a bit of confidence. It
wouldn't make sense to add both a hedge and a booster in this case. "It seems
that the government clearly made ..." That doesn't make make any sense. So often you
do have to pick between the two if you're going to use one or the other. In
the third one, just to speed it up a little bit, we can say "his trial
apparently captivated the nation" ("apparently" would be a hedge).
You could also say "undoubtedly," which would be a booster. And in the last one
we have, "Many people in Quebec had sympathy for the French-speaking
Catholic Metis people." if you want to hedge again you could say, "They had
sympathy for the mostly French-speaking Catholic Metis people." Not every
Metis person necessarily was Catholic or French-speaking. If you want to be more
confident you could say, "In fact, many people in Quebec," and so on. Alright, as
you can see then, whenever you write something you constantly have to make
these kinds of editorial choices in terms of the tone that you want to
strike. Do you want to seem confident? Do you want to seem nuanced?
There's there's always a balance, and both hedges and boosters have pros and
cons. For example, if you use hedges all the time you're going to seem like you
have no self-confidence. It may also clutter up your writing. On
the other hand, what's very positive about hedges is that you can show nuance,
you can show that you don't generalize very easily, [and] you can show that you're
open for discussion and debate. These are all very positive virtues. The
same thing goes for boosters. If you use them all the time you're going to seem like
you are cocky and you generalize a lot. But on the other hand if you use them
sparingly and in the right places, you can strike a tone of
confidence and authority and so on. So you'll have to make your choice, but the
biggest thing is to be aware of your options, and when you know your
options then I think you're going to be a more effective writer. That's it for
hedges and boosters.