🍪 The Gushing Review Trap
🍪 The Gushing Review Trap
Imagine reading a restaurant review that says: “The pasta was wonderfully, brilliantly, divinely, masterfully, stunningly, magnificently, gloriously perfect.” By the sixth adverb, you have stopped believing any of them. Too many evaluation words crowd each other out and become noise.
This is the saturation trap. Students who have learned that Q4 rewards evaluation verbs sometimes overcorrect: they stuff every sentence with “brilliantly, powerfully, masterfully, effectively, convincingly” — and the examiner reads it as empty gushing, not analysis. The solution is calibration: use evaluation verbs deliberately, sparsely, and always grounded in a specific reason.
Evaluation works like seasoning in cooking — too little is bland, too much overpowers the dish. The AQA Q4 mark scheme rewards evaluation that is supported and specific. Both failure modes sit at the extremes of the same scale.
Now try it yourself
Quiz · Question 1 of 10
A student writes: 'The writer brilliantly, powerfully, masterfully, and stunningly uses imagery here.' What is wrong with this sentence?
Tap an answer to check it