How would you phrase this ban? Taken literally, it would be a bit like banning the letter E. Your students would fall back on circumlocutions like “essay of analysis”, which is presumably not what you have in mind.

As for near misses, I think Mark Twain said it best: “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.”

Also: I had a mildly disturbing moment the other day when I realized what was weird about the speech of a fellow student I know. She speaks in paper-ese. That is, she has incorporated certain habits of language that everyone uses when trying to pad out uninteresting papers to meet a minimum length requirement *into her daily speech*, without realizing that these things, when expressed in spoken rather than written form, tend to make you sound like a lunatic. The most obvious example is the breathless list of synonymous words or phrases. Something’s not just “shocking”, it’s “shocking, appalling, disgusting, wretched, horrifying”. It’s not just “a bad idea”, it’s “a bad idea, a false step, a foolish turning, a dangerous precedent”. We don’t just need to “stand against it”, we need to “stand against it, speak to just how wrong it is, rally all like-minded people in opposition”. It becomes wearying to listen to her after a while; it’s like one of Winston Churchill’s speeches times ten, only with the subject matter being student council elections rather than impending war. It’s really too much misplaced intensity for my stomach to handle.

I’ve since made a note to myself that “thesauring”, as I call it, is a very dangerous habit for people with big vocabularies with a tendency toward hyperbole, and have tried to eliminate it from my writing as much as I possibly can.

I’d settle for being able to convince people that “incredibly” is not a synonym of “very.”