don’t take my word for it

How to spot it

Wait for the clause after the offer. A writer says "don't take my word for it" and then hands you, in the same breath, either an address or an adjective. An address is something you could go and open, such as a dated transcript or a named person you could write to. An adjective is the results speaking for themselves, or the difference being obvious to anyone who looks. Both sentences make the same generous sound. Only one of them can be acted on, and telling the two apart takes about as long as reading to the end of the line.

The honest use and the reflex share every word up to the point where the evidence should arrive, so the phrase on its own tells you nothing about the writer. Everything rides on what comes next. When you find one in your own draft, skip the argument about whether you meant it sincerely. Go and look at what you put after it. If you cannot point at the thing you were offering, you have paid the reader a compliment about their independence instead of giving them a route to it.

Why models overdo it

This sentence completes a shape that models have met over and over in human writing. The shape turns up wherever people argue in English, because writers who really do have receipts reach for it constantly, and the opening half costs nothing to produce. Pointing at something real is the expensive part, since it means knowing where the evidence lives and whether a reader who goes looking will find it there. A next-word guess supplies none of that. It supplies the frame, then fills the frame with whatever usually sits inside one, which is another generality.

Of the whole family, this is the most forgivable habit, and it is still worth cutting. The sentence sounds generous and delivers nothing, because nothing in the process that produced it registered that a promise had been made. The reader registers it. Send someone off to check twice and give them nothing to check, and they start discounting you, and the discount falls on the true claims too.

When it's fine

The offer holds up when the next clause pays. Chris Hedges, speaking on Democracy Now in 2005 about what the movement he covered was saying out loud, did not ask anyone to trust him on it. He told his audience to turn on Christian broadcasting and hear it themselves. The invitation names a dial, anyone can act on it that same evening, and the claim either survives the checking or it does not. That is the device working, and it works because the sentence costs the writer something.

It is also fine, oddly, where there is nothing to check at all. Tennyson gave the plain form to a Lincolnshire farmer pronouncing on the poor, and not a scrap of evidence stands behind the verdict. Nobody reads a dialect poem for its sources, and the line is there to show us the farmer. Trouble starts only when the sentence borrows the authority of a citation in a place where citations are expected and then declines to produce one. If you can finish yours with an address, it stays. Without one, the bare claim is more honest than a claim wearing a promise it has no intention of keeping.

Where it comes from

The assurance is old, and it was tired early. Take my word for it ran through nineteenth-century speech as a commonplace, which is why Tennyson could hand it to a farmer in dialect and trust every reader to hear the register. By 1906 the Fowler brothers had filed it in The King's English among trite phrases, beside depend upon it, as one of the phrases that save a writer the trouble of producing statistics, or of thinking what he means. In 1922 Robert Lynd pictured Arnold Bennett's confident manner as a nod implying "You may take my word for it," and in Lynd's telling the confidence was earned, since where Wells speculated, Bennett found out.

Rhetoric had named the move long before either of them. Epitrope is the figure that turns the matter over to the audience, and Silva Rhetoricae gives one of its senses as suggesting a proof of something without having to state it. The Greek behind the name means, roughly, a turn upon, in the sense of yielding, and the Latin equivalents are concessio and permissio, both of which describe granting rather than proving. Silva Rhetoricae lists irony among its related figures, for a good reason: handing the judgment over can be a real invitation, or it can be a way of appearing to invite while keeping the evidence out of sight.

The form you are likelier to meet now is the negative one, the invitation to check rather than the request to trust. It suits any medium where the evidence might sit a click away, and the web made that promise briefly cheap to keep and then cheap to imitate for the same reason. A sentence that used to mean trust me now means go and look, which is a better thing to mean. It is worth precisely as much as the looking.