World class and other phrases that say nothing at all

Superlatives that any institution could use about itself carry no information, and readers have learned to skip them.

Take a paragraph of institutional copy, cover the name and ask whether it could belong to any other provider in the country. If it could, it is not describing anything. World class, cutting edge, industry leading, student centred, passionate, innovative: these appear so uniformly that they have become a texture rather than a message. A reader skims past them the way they skim past a footer. Worse, their presence signals that the specific facts are missing, because an institution with a genuinely unusual fact leads with the fact.

The substitution test is simple. Replace each adjective with the evidence that made somebody want to use it. Instead of state of the art facilities, say what is in the room and when it was installed. Instead of expert teaching staff, say what those staff did before they taught and what they still do. Instead of strong industry links, name the kinds of workplaces students go into and what they do there. The result is longer, plainer and vastly more persuasive, because it gives the reader something to picture.

Where a claim genuinely cannot be evidenced, the honest move is to cut it rather than soften it. Softening produces the worst of both outcomes: a sentence that still overstates and now also hedges. And because advertising and promotional statements are subject to obligations that differ by sector and jurisdiction, anything approaching a comparative or performance claim should be checked with the relevant authority before it goes out, not after.