What a housing reporter learns about adjectives
Six years on the housing beat cured me of describing anything as vibrant, bustling, or up-and-coming.
On the housing beat you learn quickly that adjectives are where the lying happens. Nobody writes a false sentence about a rent figure. They write "an up-and-coming neighbourhood" and let the reader do the work.
The words that got cut from my copy most often were the ones doing the most persuading: vibrant, bustling, hidden gem, characterful. Each is a claim wearing the costume of a description. "Characterful" means small. "Up-and-coming" means someone is about to be priced out, and the sentence is written from the point of view of the person doing the pricing.
The test
Replace the adjective with the fact underneath it. If the fact is duller than the adjective, the adjective was doing promotional work. If the fact is more interesting — and it usually is — you have found your sentence.
I still catch myself. Brand work is where the temptation is strongest, because the adjectives are what the client recognises as their voice. The compromise I have settled on is that every adjective has to survive one round of "according to whom".