Highly Anticipated? Hah!
As I’ve suggested previously, odds are if you insert the word clearly in your sentence you are trying to impose clarity on something that isn’t clear at all. If something really is clear, you don’t need to say so.
In the same vein is the phrase highly anticipated (‘This highly anticipated decision from …’; ‘The release of the OSC’s highly anticipated rule on …’). The phrase gets used a lot: according to Slaw’s Canadian Law Blogs Search Engine, it occurs approximately 5,080,000 times in Canadian blog posts.
That sure sounds like over-use – or, in other words, a reason not to use a hackneyed expression.
Not only hackneyed, but also far from the truth. What it usually means is ‘highly anticipated by a single law nerd or small group of them who need to make this blog post sound more important than it probably is’.
You can and should do better in your blogging: show your reader why something is important or interesting; don’t merely assert.
Start the discussion!