The Word and the Thing
Six drawings of what happened, each labelled with the phrase used to announce it.
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The drawing is what happened. The label is what it was called.
Spot the soft words institutions use to hide what happened, and why using them in your own writing weakens your point.
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One sentence from a company statement. Say what physically happened — most people cannot, and that is the finding.
Following a review of operating requirements, the group has completed a workforce adjustment across its northern sites.
Say what happened. Not what you suspect — what the sentence tells you.
How many people? Did they leave, or move? Was it voluntary? Which sites? When?
The sentence answers none of that. And it is not badly written — it is written extremely well, for its purpose.
How euphemism answers a Reading question, why it loses marks in Writing, and the one place it is exactly the right choice.
IELTS Reading asks what the writer thinks. Candidates hunt for opinion adjectives and often find none, because academic writers do not supply them. What academic writers supply instead is word choice, and euphemism is the loudest kind.
The programme required significant structural adjustment in the recipient economies.
The programme required deep cuts to health and education spending in the recipient economies.
Same policy. The first writer is reporting from inside the institution's frame; the second is reporting from outside it. Neither sentence contains an opinion adjective and both make the writer's position legible.
When a writer-attitude question offers you sympathetic, neutral and critical, the euphemism count is often the fastest evidence in the passage.
Six drawings of what happened, each labelled with the phrase used to announce it.
The drawing is what happened. The label is what it was called.
Six official sentences. Say plainly what each one is reporting.
Each sentence is real institutional English. Choose the plain description it is standing in for. Two of the six are not euphemisms at all — they are exact technical or neutral usage, and reading them as evasion would be its own error.
"The bank has agreed a restructuring of its sovereign debt holdings with the finance ministry." What has happened?
Three chains. The same phrase is evidence when you read it, a weakness when you write it, and precise when you attribute it.
Chain 1 — Reading
A passage reads: The programme's efficiency gains were achieved through a series of workforce adjustments and a rationalisation of the regional office network. The question asks about the writer's attitude.
Step 1 — What do those two phrases tell you about where the writer is standing?
Step 2 — Therefore the answer to a writer-attitude question is that the writer is towards the programme.
Chain 2 — Writing
Your essay argues that automation has harmed manufacturing communities. Your paragraph has already given the closure dates and the local unemployment figures.
Candidates: downsizing / job losses
Step 1 — What would the softer phrase do to the argument you have just made?
Step 2 — Therefore the expert writes: The decade produced 40,000 across the region.
Chain 3 — Quoting
Your essay is describing what a company said at the time, and you want the reader to notice the gap between the announcement and the event.
Step 1 — What does attributing the phrase to the company let you do that adopting it does not?
Step 2 — Therefore the expert writes: The company described the closures as a of its estate.