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Effective vs Impactful - What's the difference?

effective | impactful |

As adjectives the difference between effective and impactful

is that effective is having the power to produce a required effect or effects while impactful is having impact.

As a noun effective

is a soldier fit for duty.

effective

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Having the power to produce a required effect or effects.
    • The pill is an effective method of birth control.
  • Producing a decided or decisive effect.
    • The president delivered an effective speech!
  • * Jeremy Taylor
    • Whosoever is an effective , real cause of doing his neighbour wrong, is criminal.
  • Efficient, serviceable, or operative, available for useful work.
    • How long does it take to make a bunch of civilians an effective military force?
    My effective income after taxes and child support is $500 a month.
    The effective radiated power is determined by multiplying the transmitter power output with the antenna gain.
    The effective voltage of an alternating current is 0.7 times its peak voltage.
  • Actually in effect.
    • The curfew is effective at midnight.
  • Having no negative coefficients.

    • Related terms

    * effect * effectivity * effectual * efficacious * efficacity * efficacy * efficiency * efficient

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • (military) A soldier fit for duty.
  • *1876 , , Recollections of the Elkhorn Campaign :
  • *:The Army of the West reached Corinth sometime after the battle of Shiloh. We were 15,000 effectives , and brought Beauregard's effective force up to 45,000 men.
    • ----

    impactful

    English

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Having impact.
  • * {{quote-book
    • , year=1950 , year_published=2008 , edition=Digitized , editor= , author= , title=Movies: A Psychological Study , chapter= citation , genre= , publisher=Free Press , isbn= , page=22 , passage=We might suppose that some of the most impactful heroines of current films would combine these two functions: that of the good-bad girl ... }}
  • * 1969 , W. James Popham, "Curriculum Materials," Review of Educational Research , vol. 39, no. 3, p. 321:
    • It is strongly recommended that in the future such investigations not be reported in the literature unless they are designed to test the effects of some hopefully impactful treatment variation.
  • * 1982 , S. E. Taylor and S. C. Thompson, "Stalking the Elusive 'Vividness' Effect," Psychological Bulletin , vol. 89, no. 2, p. 155:
    • Everyone knows that vividly presented information is impactful and persuasive.
  • * 2001 , A. Mukherjee and W. D. Hoyer, "The Effect of Novel Attributes on Product Evaluation," The Journal of Consumer Research , vol. 28, no. 3, p. 463:
    • A dominant finding in psychology and consumer behavior has been that negative information is more impactful than positive information.
  • *

    • Usage notes

    * Proscribed by some authorities, who recommend “influential” or “effective” instead. Alternatively, one may rephrase to “have an impact” or “have a strong impact”. However, many usages can be found, particularly in business and education as well as in journalism and academic writing. * Usage is more common in the US.

    Synonyms

    * effectual, impactive

    Derived terms

    * impactfully * impactfulness

    References

    * * Historical usage frequency at Google books