[quickgist]

I find myself disagreeing with many of the examples. E.g. according to the article:

Bad: It is quite difficult to find untainted samples. Better: It is difficult to find untainted samples.

Bad: We used various methods to isolate four samples. Better: We isolated four samples.

Something being quite difficult reads significantly differently than just being difficult. You haven't made the sentence better, you've changed the meaning.

And the fact that you used various methods instead of a single method is information missing from the second sentence.

[dspillett]

> Something being quite difficult reads significantly differently than just being difficult. You haven't made the sentence better, you've changed the meaning.

The problem there is that the meaning quite carries can vary significantly depending on the reader or the context where the word is read (so it can read differently depending on how previous sentences have primed the reader, which means the same person might read it differently with that context than if they start at that sentence. Quite differently, in fact!

This is because in spoken form the word changes a lot with tone of voice. Technically "quite difficult" means "slightly difficult" but in many places actually means "damn near impossible".

I'd day that while removing the word isn't wrong, replacing it with a more specific comparison would be better.

[mindcrime]

And as I understand it, Brits are particularly fond of using "quite" in a sarcastic fashion, so "quite difficult" in England might mean "not difficult at all, you sodding idiot" or something along those lines.

[n4r9]

Brit here, this isn't something I'm familiar with. "Quite" usually means "somewhat" as in "I found the test quite hard". In upper class speech it can mean "very" as in "that was quite the challenge" or "agreed" when said on its own as a response to a statement.

[mindcrime]

Interesting. Maybe it's a regional thing, or a generational thing. Or maybe I'm just flat out mis-remembering. Or maybe some of my British friends told me that, but they were just taking the piss. :-)

It's something I've come across references to more than a few times over the years though.

EDIT:

OK, FWIW, I can't find any solid reference at a quick glance to the form I was thinking of, but Google's "AI Search" GenAI thing does reflect what I was getting at, so I don't think it's completely something I made up. Unless me and the Google AI both hallucinated the same thing.

Here's what Google has to say:

    In British English, when someone says "quite" with a 
    slightly sarcastic tone, it usually means they are 
    implying something is "not at all" or "very much the 
    opposite" of what they are describing, essentially 
    downplaying a positive quality to express mild 
    disapproval or skepticism. 

    Example:

    "Oh, that new restaurant was quite good." (Meaning: it 
    was actually pretty bad)
    "He's quite the brilliant mind." (Meaning: he's not very 
    intelligent at all)

I probably did overstate the degree of emphasis of this though.

[buran77]

> when someone says "quite" with a slightly sarcastic tone

The sarcastic tone is the secret sauce which makes the difference with a lot of words, including qualifiers like "quite". Try applying a sarcastic tone to "definitely" in the Earth is "definitely" flat and you'll see how people react.

[Izkata]

Teacher: "There's plenty of languages where two negatives will negate each other and create a positive, but no languages where two positives will make a negative."

Student, sarcastic tone: "Yeah, right."

(I have no idea where I got this from, read it online ages ago)

[sourcepluck]

A member of the British upper crust can correct me if I'm off the mark, but the definition there is of a really existing usage, and then the example doesn't match it at all. Did you make the example up yourself, by any chance?

There is, in ordinary people's language, "yeah, it was quite good", when talking about a movie or something, which could easily mean, it was moderately ok, not amazing in any way. It'll depend entirely on tone, you could say it in a chirpy tone and you'd mean that it was actually pretty good. This is the most common usage, and familiar to our brothers and sisters and non-binary-siblings across the pond, I suppose.

And then there's your mathematics teacher saying, "Oh, this lemma really is quite trivial", meaning it's very, very trivial, or a "quite difficult proof", meaning you've to drag yourself across hot coals for hours before it hits you.

Then there is also the meaning you describe above! E.g., a bunch of aristocrats are having dinner, and the candelabra suddenly breaks loose, flies through the air, and smashes into a thousand pieces with a crash. Luckily, no one is hurt.

Everyone looks around, shocked, there's a few shrieks of course, and then one of them says: "Oh, what a smashing evening!" and the other says, in a bored drawl, "Quite". It's like an additional layer of being removed from and above the mere idea that the original thing could have been worthy of a positive comment (in this case, the dinner).

[russfink]

Regardless, your point is valid. Adding a valueless word like “quite” does not improve clarity or meaning and can only have a negative impact. Not worth the risk.

[dspillett]

> And as I understand it, Brits are particularly fond of using "quite" in a sarcastic fashion,

Brit here. Many of us are fond of using _any_ word/phrase with sarcasm, irony, or both.

> so "quite difficult" in England might mean "not difficult at all, you sodding idiot"

Depending on tone and other context "quite" can mean anything from a little to a huge amount. It can also mean exactly, as in "Well, quite.".

This is why you need to be careful in professional and academic contexts, or anywhere in writing for that matter, and use domain specific terminology as much as possible.

[DonHopkins]

It may have been Jimmy Carr who pointed out that:

Americans think that Brits can be quite patronizing ("pæ-trə-naɪ-zɪŋ").

Actually it's patronizing ("peɪ-trə-naɪ-zɪŋ").

[barry-cotter]

This is another thing that is captured in tone more than anything though the Brits do have a well deserved reputation for sarcasm. Difficult to convey in print what meaning you want the recipient to get.

[amelius]

> the meaning quite carries can vary significantly

Yes, it can be read as a signal that there is some variability in the amount of difficulty.

Putting more uncertainty in the wording is not necessarily bad, and in a scientific context it can be actually good.

[ninalanyon]

> Technically "quite difficult" means "slightly difficult"

Really? You must come from a different literary tradition. Quite means exactly.

See the first definition in the Cambridge Dictionary at https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/quite

completely:

The two situations are quite different.

The colours almost match but not quite.

I enjoyed her new book though it's not quite as good as her last one.

UK formal Are you quite sure you want to go?

Quite honestly/frankly, the thought of it terrified me.

[codethief]

Your examples are excellent but I agree with the GP that "quite" can also be used in the sense of "somewhat but not entirely".

[fasthandle]

Quite difficult = Not impossible.

So, completely difficult. But completely difficult doesn't sound quite right, probably as less syllables are preferred over many unless there's a quite good reason to prefer the latter.

[notahacker]

You've omitted the definition on the lower part of the page:

quite

adverb, predeterminer

"a little or a lot but not completely:"

I'm quite tired but I can certainly walk a little further. There was quite a lot of traffic today but yesterday was even busier. It was quite a difficult job. He's quite attractive but not what I'd call gorgeous. It would be quite a nuisance to write to everyone.

The same dictionary also includes a grammar article clarifying that quite [usually] means "a little, moderately, not very", when the adjective or adverb it modifies is gradable (e.g "good" or indeed "difficult") and it being an intensifier in [generally rarer] situations where the adjective or adverb isn't (e.g "it is quite wrong to say that 'quite' invariably means 'exactly')

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/qui...

[lupire]

My takeaway from all this is that "quite" means literally nothing and belongs on the banned words list.

[notahacker]

I agree. It's quite useless.

[dspillett]

> Quite means exactly.

Quite.

[Or sometimes “Quite so”.]

Though in informal communication the word's meaning can be quite different depending on context and tone.

[ffsm8]

Great examples, but you should probably remove the "completely" header - as the following examples don't fall under it. I'll delete this comment in 15 minutes ( • ‿ • )

[Timwi]

Not only is “completely” the definition they're quoting from the dictionary, it is also exactly what is exemplified by the examples, so I'm not sure what you mean by “don't fall under it”.

[ffsm8]

Ooooh, now I get it- I completely misunderstood that! Indeed, I can substitute every quiet with completely and it's meaning never changes from how it would've been interpreted!

(And I totally forgot to delete the comment too)

I just didn't realize that and only considered how I'd interpret the meaning of completely on is own. And that meaning doesn't translate to every example, hence my previous confusion

[ninalanyon]

I didn't add completely, that's a quote directly from the Cambridge Dictionary.

[t8sr]

And this is why I now have to read 30 page design docs that could have been 3 pages and said the same thing.

Please try to understand why people have such strong dislike of floral writing, especially in technical texts. If you read a lot of papers or designs, it makes your life miserable.

[vharuck]

Yes, it's the usual advice of how artists/authors/scientists make something: 1) Make the thing, 2) Try removing each part, 3) If the work fails without that part, put it back.

For example, adverbs are good when readers might have the wrong image without them. E.g., "Alice [quickly] walked." Most of the time, writing is better without words like "very" or "quite."

[perching_aix]

When it comes to technical writing the only thing I can really discuss is documentation, and the key thing I'm personally looking for there is structure.

It could be about basically anything, just please, pretty please, for the love of god, make it structured. And I don't mean sections with catchy headings, I mean as structured and reference-like as possible.

I want to minimize the amount of time I spend reading prose and searching around, as well as the chance of missing things. I want to hit CTRL+F and be put where I need to be stat and have that be enough. Structure alone can convey a lot of the idea behind how something works - please trust me to able to utilize it to make basic leaps in logic.

A bad example for this is AWS documentation. It's a mish-mash of prose and structured reference. A good example is the AWS CLI documentation (although if they lead with example usages first, that'd be even better).

[maccard]

Writing good technical text is an art. There is a certain amount of fluff that helps, and it’s almost unnoticeable when it’s there. Without it, it’s too terse. Quite often, my complaint of technical documentation is “it did exactly what the docs said it would do, except in a situation that I didn’t expect it to do that”.

[seanhunter]

Strong disagree. If you want to make a point about using different methods, say what you did.

“We isolated four samples using the following methods…”

[zaptheimpaler]

Yeah most of his examples looked terrible to me. It's actually part of why reading papers is so damn difficult even when the paper says something simple. They're obsessed with this stilted formal tone that no one actually likes and leaves out subtle but important context clues.