Biotext

To enhance or not to enhance …

Welcome to the Biotext blog!

Over the next months and years we will try to bring you some interesting titbits about the interface of science and policy that we work in. We hope that you will enjoy our posts but we are not aiming to ‘enhance’ your appreciation of these issues. Why? Because one of the words we try not to use at Biotext is ‘enhance’. We are not alone, ‘enhance’ and ‘enhancement’ were top of the list of words targeted by Don Watson in his 2005 book Death Sentence – How Cliches, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language for immediate deletion from all public policy documents.

The reason that ‘enhance’ is, in Don Watson’s words, a ‘weasel word’ is because, depending on the context, it can mean ‘increase’ or ‘improve’ or ‘enlarge’ or any one of a raft of similar terms (swell, streamline, strengthen etc). As the reader does not know which of these meanings is intended, if any, it usually falls between the cracks and ends up meaning not much at all (as in ‘the government is committed to enhancing public health outcomes …’).

Despite this public advice, at Biotext we have noticed a definite increase in the use of ‘enhance’ in the past few years. Just the other day, it popped up a few times in a report we were editing and despite our protestations we were not allowed to change it.

In science writing, the use of ‘enhance’ can be even more troublesome than in public policy. For example, a sentence like ‘the enzyme activity was enhanced by addition of calcium’ could mean that the calcium promoted production of more enzyme molecules or that calcium improved the activity if the existing enzyme molecules. Although this may not matter in some instances, it is much more informative for readers, and hardly any more words, to spell out the meaning precisely. We will keep trying …