10.70 generalization

You often want to avoid making a firm, forceful statement, because you are aware of facts that do not quite fit in with what you are saying.

One way of doing this is to use a sentence adjunct which indicates that you are making a general, basic, or approximate statement.

• Basically, the more craters a surface has, the older it is.
• By and large the broadcasters were free to treat this material very much as they wished.
• I think on the whole we don't do too badly.

The following adjuncts are used like this:

• all in all, all things considered, altogether, as a rule, at a rough estimate, basically, broadly, by and large, essentially, for the most part, fundamentally, generally, in essence, in general, on average, on balance, on the whole, overall, ultimately

Note that you can also use the expressions 'broadly speaking', 'generally speaking', and 'roughly speaking'.

• We are all, broadly speaking, middle class.
• Roughly speaking, the problem appears to be confined to the tropics.