When you're speaking to incidents of fact there are only a few ways to phrase it.
The dog jumped over the fence.
The canine hurdled the barrier doesn't exactly say the same thing.
Agreed. When writing academic or press stuff I've had to go through some real writing gymnastics to be in a safe zone. I guess I'm good at tit though, the semester I took rhet and Comp II I was the only person in any of my professor's classes that didn't have a gray area or worse in their first draft.