Tip of the week: The challenge of "impactful"

I love reader questions. They send me into a flurry of research, challenging any assumptions the reader or I might have. Sometimes the assumption is right, but more often it’s not. As a result, the reader and I learn something. And when I get to share the question with all of our readers, we all learn something.

James Deaton of Brethren Press sent me into such a flurry last week with this question:

What is your assessment of the proper usage of impactful in book publishing? On occasion I use the word impact as a noun (Garner agrees), but I never use it as a verb or (God forbid) in its adjectival form, impactful. I feel the word has been overused by many mainstream publishers. And, personally, I just think it’s plain wrong. Plus, aren’t there better words out there? 

Impact

My first reaction is simply “yuck!” I do not like this word, nor its parent impact. Unfortunately for my personal tastes, I edit a lot of business writing and I learned years ago that impact is acceptable as a verb. In fact, its use as a verb predates its use as a noun, and it’s been around since the early 1600s. As with impactful, impact is disparaged by many language communities but not business or journalism. In the business world, it’s downright expected. If you don’t use it when you could have, you lose credibility with your audience.

Impactful

James’s assessment that impactful is being used frequently by mainstream publishers is correct. A search on Google Books returns 11,300 hits in books published since 2000. I don’t know if that qualifies as overuse, but it certainly is a trend. In the first 30 results, most hits were from business books, with three from books offering advice against its usage (Garner’s Modern American Usage being one of them).

Impactful first appeared in print in 1968, according to Online Etymology Dictionary. And although few of the dictionaries I checked give the term its own entry (The American Heritage Dictionary and Concise Oxford English Dictionary among them), many list it under impact, including Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. None of the entries I checked labeled impactful as jargon, yet most of the uses I see indicate that it is business jargon, as Garner’s says.

However, I have to disagree with Garner’s. Usage of this word is common enough, particularly in business and news writing (Google News returned 1,390 instances of it when I checked), without much comment. It’s those who are hyperaware of language, such as we copyeditors, who are opposed to the term. And on what grounds? We don’t like it.

The argument that you can’t pull the word apart to make a “full of [+quality]” is weak. Certainly, when a noun joins with –ful, the noun is usually a quality and the meaning is usually “full of [noun],” as in sorrowful. But sometimes the noun in question leads to a meaning of “having or displaying [noun]” or “causing or exciting [noun],” as with delightful and fearful. Impactful describes something that has or displays impact or effect. 

The study found that most healthcare professionals consider the transition to ICD-10 to be one of the most impactful issues their practice is currently facing. —DOTmed News, February 7, 2012

In the end, there’s nothing wrong with impactful, but you don’t have to like it, either. There is almost always more than one way to say something. Some communities of language speakers still don’t like this word, as evidenced by its use in limited topics. Expect to see impactful in business and marketing writing, as well as in journalism and less frequently in other places. But you have to use it only if your audience expects you to.

Do you have a question on language, the art of editing, or working as an editor? E-mail it to me!