Readers, this post may leave you mystified, but many people who write will understand.
In the "writing world," expert and (non-expert writers) exhort fledglings like me to write neatly, concisely, and to strip sentences of all unnecessary fluff.
And to beware, at all costs, the most useless word of them all: the adverb.
Adverbs, as the maxim goes, are redundant and weaken the power of verbs, diluting a sentence with two words when one strong word is preferred. If you do use them, no more than two or three to a manuscript.
OK.
That is true in some cases. And maybe the origin of Tom Swifties.
But the point of adverbs is to modify the verb, the adjective, and even other adverbs, and I drilled this definition into my children's head when we studied the eight parts of speech.
The right adverbs at the right time (sometimes even several at a time) gives the black and white sentence its color and tone.
Agreed, any useless word, adverb or not, should be ruthlessly removed during the editing phases. But not at the sacrifice of the writing, not to create writing stripped to its informational essence and abandon writing that stirs emotions.
It's nuanced, I know.
Before I submitted the first installment of Before the Blood to my editor, I rewrote the first three paragraphs of the third chapter many times to eliminate the adverbs and most of the adjectives (because they come under suspect, too).
Ever hear of the Peter Principal? It's when a person rises to a level of incompetence.
For example, a great teacher is promoted through the ranks until he finally becomes a superintendent. But teaching and superintending are different skills, and the traits that made our prototype a great teacher make him a poor superintendent. He has risen to his own incompetence.
The same came happen with over-editing. I finally decided to leave the paragraphs alone and let my editor decide if the adverbs had overtaken the garden like kudzu or of they added a sense of naturalness, like a few dandelion heads in a back yard.
This poison of tallies and figures had spread to his mother,
for Lucetta moved more slowly and with greater lethargy, an ethereal presence
even in her own suite, as she cared for, and murmured softly to, her beloved and rapidly multiplying
houseplants.
Slate has a hilariously true article that expounds on this more eloquently than I did. And if you want to come away from it with a deeper sense of good writing, please read it to the end.
Because I have clearly broken all the adverb rules in this post.
Illustration by Kathleen Rose Van Pelt for "Bryony."
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