Suddenly Impactful

On a widely loved unloved word.

Image by TyrusTime.

So is “impactful” even a word?

It is a word, yes. I might not love that it’s a word, but it is. And it’s not merely a word. More and more, it’s considered standard.

From Shunned to Standard

“Ain’t” comes with a “nonstandard” tag, and even the permissive crowd over at Merriam-Webster¹ notes that “ain’t” is “widely disapproved as nonstandard” (my emphasis). Even “irregardless” is a word. It’s just a nonstandard word, as even Merriam-Webster insists, this time without hedging.

“Impactful,” though, is increasingly not getting tagged as nonstandard, either with or without qualification. The Chicago Manual of Style notes that it’s considered a solecism by traditionalists and suggests avoiding it, but such objections are getting rarer and less fervent.

Why an Unloved Word Is Getting So Much Love

Like many people who fuss over writing and write about writing, I don’t care for “impactful.” I don’t care for it with considerable vehemence. But I think it’s worth asking why it’s becoming so common² and why so many people seem to like it so much.

Metaphors can be vivid when they refer to something tangible, like an impact, and part of the appeal of “impactful” is metaphoric: “What kind of employee am I going to be? Impactful!” It’s essentially answering the question with “KABOOM is what kind!”

And it’s not just employees who can be explosive. Contemporary business writing is rife with statements like “Here at Celebrimbot we empower the visionaries of tomorrow and today by delivering impactful AI solutions.”

KABOOM! BAM! BOFF! POWIE!

It’s like watching circa-1967 Adam West get into a fight. It’s not subtle, but brightly colored and full-screen. The Joker’s jaw surely shudders with the impact.

People who don’t like KABOOM can see it as overly obvious, overly easy, unclever. People who do like KABOOM can see its detractors as overly reserved. Or as a bunch of snobs.

Another thing that draws people to “impactful,” if I’m reading context and messengers correctly, is not about the metaphoric but about the concrete and the measurable³. People use “impactful” to answer “YES!” to “Will this lead to substantially more money? Will it increase efficiency by such-and-such percent? Will it make a measurable positive difference when it comes to the metrics we’re supposed to meet?”

“Impactful” detractors can find this crass or materialistic, even ethically suspect, while “impactful” enthusiasts seem to be using it to identify like-minded people who think the bottom line is the most important thing. Or at least one of the important things. It’s good to be able to keep the lights on, right?

Understanding “Impactful” While Advising Against It

I think it’s useful to think about why people like “impactful” because it helps me understand them, and also to understand how people like me who dislike the word can come across poorly. Am I such a sophisticate that I demand there be no joy in an old-fashioned Batman POWIE? Do I want to insist I’m too high-minded and ethereal to worry about the lights going out?

I will answer no to both questions. Adam West can bring me joy, and I have experienced too much financial anxiety to think I have somehow transcended the need for money.

And yet I will continue to avoid “impactful” in my own writing and continue to advise other writers to avoid it. To make the advice part work, though, we need to fine-tune our objections.

IMPACTLESSNESS! – Being Inside the Box – Meaningless Metrics

People who like “impactful” presumably want it to be, well, impactful. Given the word’s ubiquity in marketing, management, higher education, and elsewhere, though, its impactfuliciousness has most likely lost some of its savor. You can’t become a bestselling fiction writer BY WRITING ALL OF YOUR NOVELS IN ALL CAPS AND ITALICS! As many have pointed out, to emphasize too much is to emphasize poorly.

You also don’t want your language to resemble everyone else’s. If “impactful” appears in a job posting with other overused words and phrases, as it often does, the eyerolls that will result will not be confined to snobs and sonneteers. If a company is advertising a “role” for…

an impactful, detail-oriented self-starter and team player who thinks outside the box to bring innovative solutions to the table in a fast-paced, dynamic environment

…readers will suspect that the company in question (A) confuses the innovative with the imitated and (B) exists very much inside the box.

People who recognize that metrics and the bottom line are important should also recognize that “impactful” isn’t used solely by people who hold these sensible beliefs. It is also used, and used frequently and with enthusiasm, by…

1. People who use manipulative data to serve themselves, or whatever their unit is called in the bureaucratic structure, rather than those they claim to be serving.

2. People who justify short-term thinking and fad-following with what they claim is hard-headed realism about the bottom line.

If you have been in government, education, or the corporate world for long, you have lived through multiple PowerPoint presentations slide decks put together by both sorts. These experiences have led many listeners to be wary of all things “impactful.”

What to Do

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all replacement for “impactful” because of the word’s differing connotations. This is not a problem, though, but an opportunity.

If the KABOOM effect of an attention-getting metaphor is desired, one brilliant strategy for achieving the effect—without sounding like everyone else and without inducing long sighs from people who don’t like “impactful”—is to use an attention-getting metaphor. People who want “impactful content” can say they want something that jumps off the screen, sings, sparkles, or electrifies. If those seem too dramatic or unusual, even well-worn expressions like “pops” or “packs a punch” will feel less tired than “impactful.”

If someone means to refer to metrics, then metrics should be referred to. This can be done in a general way using words like “evidence,” “proven,” and “demonstrated” or more directly with “data,” “measure,” “metrics,” or “analytics.” Or you can use actual numbers.

As is usually so, good editing choices are about thinking through purpose and intent.

I doubt “impactful” is going anywhere anytime soon. If you want your writing to be memorable, though, and you want your message to break through the deafening pandemonium of the Right Now, there are better ways to deliver a wallop.

1. No offense to the permissive crowd at Merriam-Webster. They’re incredibly learned and incredibly smart, and I have sidled in their descriptivist direction over the years. I’m also much more sympathetic toward “ain’t” defenders, at least in everyday contexts, than I am toward people who act as if hearing “ain’t” should have us clutching at pearls.

2. As the chart suggests, the one halt in the onward march of “impactful” seems to have been in 2020 and 2021, which makes me want to look for other changes in language related to the global pandemic. The chart, by the way, ends in January of this year. I created it for fun last month and haven’t updated it because I’ve been busy. If anything happened in February that I might have missed, please let me know.

3. A connotation of “measurable” might explain why suggesting words like “influential” and “powerful”—The Chicago Manual of Style’s suggested replacements for “impactful”—is more likely to puzzle than to satisfy a data-oriented person who initially typed out “impactful.”