What is hedging language?

In an academic context, such as when writing an essay, participating in

a group discussion, or conducting a presentation, the writer or speaker of
those assignments will be required to provide ideas, opinions,
facts, arguments and evidence to support their research – as would the author
of an academic textbook or journal article. To do this, every writer or speaker
should be able to inform the audience of the certainty of their claims. While
facts may be said with confidence, claims (opinions or arguments) which
may be proven wrong by others, should be delivered in a more cautious
manner, such as in the examples below:

Do you notice the difference between the fact and the claim in the above?
The fact ‘humans live on Earth’ cannot be proven wrong and so does not
require hedging language, while the claim ‘humans will likely destroy the
planet’ could (in the distant future) be disproven. It is the
hedging adjective ‘likely’ in this claim that provides caution, protecting the
speaker or writer from being wrong. Hedging language, therefore, offers a
type of modality that allows the speaker or writer to indicate their degree of
confidence or certainty when delivering an idea or claim.

However, although the previous claim that ‘humans will likely destroy the
planet’ uses some hedging language, this claim still isn’t easy to disprove
because there’s no time limitation to that statement. Because we don’t know
when humans may or may not destroy the planet, the writer or speaker may
sound fairly confident when claiming this (using ‘likely’) without fear of
being easily disproven. But is this true for the following two claims? 
Which claim do you think is more certain, and which claim could be more
easily disproven? A or B? Clearly, in claim A, the
hedging adverb ‘probably’ indicates some degree caution, but this is not as
cautious as the hedging phrase ‘it is possible that’ in sentence B. And is this
any surprise? While claim B could be disproven today, it would take 150
years to disprove the speaker in A (which is beyond anyone’s lifetime).
Clearly then, different hedging words and phrases like ‘probably’ or ‘it is
possible that’ may be used to demonstrate varying degrees of caution and
certainty.

Why is hedging language important?

As well as allowing a speaker or writer to provide softer and more cautious

statements and claims, hedging language allows for the delivery of
politeness strategies and for that speaker or writer to be indirect about the
information they provide. But why would it be necessary to do this in an
academic context? There are four primary reasons that an academic would
choose to use hedging language:
 

1. To conform to academic standards of speech and writing.

2. To reduce the possibility of being proven wrong by other researchers,

peers, or academics (such as your tutor). Remember that one of the primary
purposes of academic research is to prove or disprove previously existing
research.
3. To demonstrate accuracy and critical thinking when reporting research,
showing that a study’s methodology may not be 100% accurate or its results
completely trustworthy.

4. To use politeness strategies to concede to the reader or listener that there

may be flaws in the information being provided.
 

Before moving on to Chapter 2 in which the different types of hedging

language are discussed, let’s look at one more example:

Does this sentence have any hedging language, and is its claim true? By
adding hedging language, we can make this claim more accurate and cautious
by highlighting to the reader that it isn’t always the case that students get
higher grades. Instead, we can show that there’s merely a tendency for this to
be true: