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This idea that you shouldn't use the word "very" has always seemed pretentious to me. What value does it add if you say "extremely" or "incredibly" instead? I guess those words have more emphasis and a different connotation, and can be better fits. I think they're probably a good idea sometimes. But other times people just want to use different words in order to sound smart.
I remember there was a time in elementary school when I was working on a paper with a friend. My job was to write it, and his job was to "fix it up and making it sound good". I remember him going in and changing words like "very", that I had used appropriately, to overly dramatic words like "stupendously". And I remember feeling annoyed at the end result of the paper because it sounded pretentious.
Here I want to argue for something similar to "stop saying very" though. I want to argue for "stop saying think".
Consider the following: "I think the restaurant is still open past 8pm". What does that mean? Are you 20% sure? 60%? 90%? Wouldn't it be useful this ambiguity disappeared?
I'm not saying that "I think" is always ambiguous and bad. Sometimes it's relatively clear from the context that you mean 20% sure, not 90%. Eg. "I thhhhhinkkk it's open past 8pm?" But you're not always so lucky. I find myself in situations where I'm not so lucky often enough. And so it seems like a good idea in general to move away from "I think" and closer to something more precise.
I want to follow up with some good guidelines for what words/phrases you can say in various situations to express different degrees of confidence, as well as some other relevant things, but I am struggling to come up with such guidelines. Because of this, I'm writing this as a shortform rather than a regular post. I'd love to see someone else run with this idea and/or propose such guidelines.
Not answering your main point, but small note on the "leaving out very" point: I've enjoyed McCloskey's writing on writing. She calls the phenomenon "elegant variation" (I don't know whether this is her only) and also teaches we have to get rid of this unhelpful practice that we get thought in school.
Yeah. And also a big part of what I'm trying to propose is some sort of new standard. I just realized I didn't express this in my OP, but I'll express it now. I agree with the problems you're saying, and I think that if we all sort of agreed on this new standard, eg. when you say "I suspect" it means X, then these problems seem like they'd go away.