Business Builder: Describing Upward Trends in Graphs
There is so much vocabulary for describing trends in visuals like graphs and charts, that we are looking at different trends each week. This is also a great article for people preparing for their IELTS as this is the vocabulary you will need for the academic writing portion if you take this version.
Verbs for Upward Trends
These verbs are great ways of describing any upward trend, just remember without an adverb all we know from these verbs is the line goes up!
grew - “Sales grew in the last quarter.”
increased - “Taxation increased in that century.”
rose - “Our stock prices rose last year”
climbed - “Costs climbed between October and January.”
jumped - “Our electricity usage jumped in July (Jumped means a sudden increase).”
skyrocketed* - “Demand for two-player video games skyrocketed in 2020.”
surged* - “Refund claims surged in 2024.”
* Note: skyrocketed and surged are verbs that always mean a dramatic increase so these don’t need an adverb to show how much they increase.”
You may notice that all the example sentences here use the passive voice, where we begin the sentence with the object (the thing that is increasing), and we don’t say who is making these increases happen. You can click here for a review of the passive voice.
Averbs for Describing Trends
We need something more than just a verb to say trends are going up, so let’s add some adverbs to say how much they go up:
Small Increases
slowly - “Profits slowly rose in the 3rd quarter.”
slightly - “The price of oranges increased slightly when deliveries slowed.”
gradually - “Our costs gradually grew in that period.”
Medium Increases
moderately - “Hires moderately increased after the Christmas period.”
steadily - “Holiday requests rose steadily after that meeting.”
Large Increases
dramatically - “Our customer count jumped dramatically during the sales.”
vastly - “We vastly increased our call handling capacity that year.”
impressively - “Our international store count rose impressively between 2010 and 2015.”
Extreme Increases
astoundingly - “Import fees jumped astoundingly during that 3-quarter period.”
unimaginably - “The average customer rating rose unimaginably over that 6-month rotation.”
*Note: You can use an adverb with skyrocketed or surged to create a very exaggerated (dramatic) description of an increase.
Summing Up
Pack your brain with these helpful verbs and adverbs so that you can describe upward trends easily, without repeating yourself, and without being vague (not specific). Get out there, describe some graphs, and sound fancy!
