Impact has lost its impact

Impact was a strong word

Impact used to mean something once. The word impact conjures up images of meteors raining down on the earth, of interstellar bodies merging and ejecting debris into space, of vehicles violently smashing into one another. Impact is also the name of a metric for measuring how frequently cited a journal is, and the name of the font everyone used on memes in the 2010’s. In science, we are so liberal with using the word impact that (I think) these days it just isn’t very… impactful?

Impact just means effect now

Nearly every time I see the word impact in scientific writing it simply means effect. Not the forceful, destructive effect that one might expect either. Impact can refer to any effect size from a barely noticeable but statistically inferred p = 0.049 effect, all the way to a complete and obvious change in something (either upwards or downwards). I even see phrasing such as “weakly impacted” and “strongly impacted” which dilute its meaning from very large effect and cements impact‘s place as a stand-in for simply effect.

Impact lacks valence

One might expect impact to allude to a decimation of something or, in drier terms, a substantial negative effect. In scientific writing it doesn’t seem to anymore. Now impact simply refers to a change or effect. Valent verb pairs can be far more informative, giving readers a sense of direction and also of the nature of what’s happening, for example:

• Increased/decreased
• Enhanced/inhibited
• Facilitate/impede
• Advance/regress
• Stimulate/repress

If you want to avoid using impact for a more complicated response, we have words for that too, for example:

• Modulate
• Alter
• Influence

I think we should see other verbs

I’m a big fan of using verbs a little more creatively to mitigate the use of the word impact (or any replacements for it):

“The growth (noun) was impacted by exposure to herbicide”

becomes:

“Plants grew (verb) less as herbicide exposure increased”

Here, we’re almost forced into giving valence, and we’ve used one less word to do so (seven versus eight). Additionally, the second sentence is self-contained, telling more of a story without the heavy backend of a broader context. My outright refusal to use the word impact (except when referring to collisions) forces me to come up with more interesting and informative sentences like this, which I think improves my writing. Maybe you will find the same?