On adverbs

[SydneyBlake]

Who knew that adverbs were so evil? I didn't, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was absurd.

I keep hearing it, though, so adverbs have gone on my hit list.

Now I'm reading Stephen King's On Writing, and in the short section where King attacks the use of adverbs, he uses no fewer than thirteen -ly words, and I'm not counting the examples.

I understand the idea--search for a better verb--but I would say that King hardly cut back his adverbs, much less eliminated them.

And in the quest to eliminate adverb usage, I'm seeing a trend that I don't think is any better, and that is converting a sentence such as "He smiled wryly" into "He made a wry smile." You've turned a 3-word sentence into a 5-word sentence and said the exact same thing.

So what are your thoughts on this one?

 

[mynameisben]

Who knew that adverbs were so evil? I didn't, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was absurd.

I keep hearing it, though, so adverbs have gone on my hit list.

Now I'm reading Stephen King's On Writing, and in the short section where King attacks the use of adverbs, he uses no fewer than thirteen -ly words, and I'm not counting the examples.

I understand the idea--search for a better verb--but I would say that King hardly cut back his adverbs, much less eliminated them.

And in the quest to eliminate adverb usage, I'm seeing a trend that I don't think is any better, and that is converting a sentence such as "He smiled wryly" into "He made a wry smile." You've turned a 3-word sentence into a 5-word sentence and said the exact same thing.

So what are your thoughts on this one?

King was using abusive repetition to hammer his point home about the over-used adverb. I don't think he is on a personal religious mission to banish their use forever. I believe adverbs have their place, but that they should be used sparingly.

Grammar and style rules are good things to know, but any writer worth her salt isn't going to allow herself to be hamstrung by them. It's great that you balk at turning a three-word sentence into a five-word sentence. It shows you've considered the rule and made a decision that suits your personal sense of style.

If everybody wrote exactly like Stephen King, we'd all write kingly.

 

[Bramblethorn]

King admits to this himself in the same section: "Is this a case of 'Do as I say, not as I do?' ... Yes. It is. ... I've spilled out my share of adverbs in my time."

Adverbs can be good, used in moderation. The problem I have with them - and I think this is also part of King's objection - is that all too often they're used as a crutch. When I read something like this:

"Don't touch me!" Jim said angrily

I think: if this author was any good, she wouldn't need to spell out that Jim is angry. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the dialogue should already have told me that Jim is angry and the context should've told me why. Often they already HAVE told me those things but don't have enough confidence in their own writing abilities to throw away the adverb.

(And I agree that rephrasing to turn the adverb into an adjective, or whatever, is not an improvement.)

 

[sr71plt]

If you can't think of a word/phrasing that better fits the flow of the read than an adverb, go ahead and use it. They were created for a purpose.

 

[_Lynn_]

Using an adverb might be the best choice to maintain the flow but too many people overuse them. I've edited stories with several adverbs per sentence. And many times that's the pattern throughout the entire piece.

 

[Bramblethorn]

FWIW, I'll throw out an example from my current WIP. First draft:

***

"My parents live in - " I named the place, a country town ninety minutes east of Melbourne. "I grew up there. When I got accepted into uni, I told them I was never going back. Happy to spend time with them, but not there."

She inhaled sympathetically. "Like that, then?"

"Just like that." I wasn't being melodramatic. Just talking about that part of my life sends a tiny spike of useless adrenaline into the scared-rabbit part of my brain, leaves me a little jittery. I hide it pretty well, but Phoebe must have noticed, because her hand moved just enough that her little finger touched mine supportively.

***

After writing this, I searched the entire chapter for "ly" and made myself justify every adverb I found. Do I really need "sympathetically"? No I don't. I've already had two chapters to establish that Phoebe is a reasonably empathic human being who's fond of Yvonne (the narrator). From what I've presented, the reader should already be able to figure out that Phoebe's attitude is sympathetic here. Likewise, "supportively" has to go.

On my second pass, I took out "She inhaled" altogether, along with "tiny" and "a little" (one of my writers' tics that I grossly overuse.)

I'm just sorry I didn't give the same treatment to my previous chapters before I posted them.

 

[SydneyBlake]

Thanks for the replies. Bramblethorn touched on a pervasive sin of mine (she admitted shamefully), but now that I've been made aware, I've been pruning with vigor.

Another book on editing favored the complete abolition of adverbs. I thought this a bit Draconian, and was relieved to have King give me permission to judiciously break the rules.

 

[_Lynn_]

Thanks for the replies. Bramblethorn touched on a pervasive sin of mine (she admitted shamefully), but now that I've been made aware, I've been pruning with vigor.

Another book on editing favored the complete abolition of adverbs. I thought this a bit Draconian, and was relieved to have King give me permission to judiciously break the rules.

I used adverbs in the past, before I knew anything about writing, but now my OCD (and the inner editor) makes it difficult for me to use them.

 

[palisa]

Another book on editing favored the complete abolition of adverbs. I thought this a bit Draconian, and was relieved to have King give me permission to judiciously break the rules.

I'm tempted to go off on a Lynne Truss-esque rant, but on adverbs rather than on punctuation!

Adverbs are wonderful! They add texture and nuance to writing that are often impossible to convey without using them. There just aren't enough verbs in the English language to do without the shadings that adverbs convey.

Of course they can be overused, just like anything else, but it would be a monotone world without them...

 

[sr71plt]

Hallelujah!

 

[sr71plt]

Oops, posted to wrong thread.

 

[Ironiclaconic]

"now we see through a glass darkly" - King James Bible

"all at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other" - Lolita

"speak the speech I pray you, as I pronounc'd it, trippingly on the tongue" - Hamlet

The adverbocide obsession is a crutch, where a useful stylistic principle gets turned into grammatic slaughter. As others have said, if you can justify it, fine, but the "he said x-ly" construction is usually going to result in mediocre prose. That said, if too many adverbs is your biggest writing problem, you are lucky.

 

[snoopercharmbrights]

In my youth (long years ago, in the Second Age of Middle Earth) there was a whole genre of comic books known as Tom Swiftlys because every verb had at least one attached adverb.

While I agree that they can be used excessively, once again we must beware of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Just as the passive mood is useful if used correctly, so with adverbs.

Will the style police round on adjectives next, or nouns? I wonder. Prepositions would be a good target; I have often wondered what is added to the meaning of "met" by adding "up with" after it.

 

[mynameisben]

Count your nuts and rest assured there is a peeve for every pet.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Who knew that adverbs were so evil? I didn't, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was absurd.

I keep hearing it, though, so adverbs have gone on my hit list.

Now I'm reading Stephen King's On Writing, and in the short section where King attacks the use of adverbs, he uses no fewer than thirteen -ly words, and I'm not counting the examples.

I understand the idea--search for a better verb--but I would say that King hardly cut back his adverbs, much less eliminated them.

And in the quest to eliminate adverb usage, I'm seeing a trend that I don't think is any better, and that is converting a sentence such as "He smiled wryly" into "He made a wry smile." You've turned a 3-word sentence into a 5-word sentence and said the exact same thing.

So what are your thoughts on this one?

Writing is like anything else.

I own a garden and orchard. According to the official ag school vids I do it all wrong, yet my veggies and fruits attract lotsa attention and compliments.

Do what works for you.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Read a fascinating slant on adverbs last night, its in an American history book.

I didnt count them in the Constitution but its asserted that adverbs work to limit or restrict actions, and when there are no abverbs modifying actions the reader is safe assuming that the actions are the universal set.

Looks like modern grammarians mighta missed the boat about adverbs.

 

[PennLady]

What I've found with adverbs is that many times they're repetitive and don't add anything. I do use them, mostly in dialogue, but in the rest of the story as well here and there. However, I avoid them with dialogue tags (I also avoid dialogue tags a lot, so hey, that works out). As someone said earlier, if you can't tell the mood of the person speaking from the rest of the story, then something's off.

 

[mynameisben]

What I've found with adverbs is that many times they're repetitive and don't add anything. I do use them, mostly in dialogue, but in the rest of the story as well here and there. However, I avoid them with dialogue tags (I also avoid dialogue tags a lot, so hey, that works out). As someone said earlier, if you can't tell the mood of the person speaking from the rest of the story, then something's off.

You'e right. More times than not, adverbs are redundant.

"Oh, you got me a present!" Roxanne squealed excitedly.

The adverb above is totally redundant. If the exclamation mark doesn't tip the reader off about Roxanne's excitement, then her squeal surely should. Yet I read stuff like this all the time, and when I do, it makes me wonder whether the author has any confidence in their ability to get an emotion across at all.

You may read something like this: "The old man plodded slowly across the street." And being hyper-adverb aware, you may be inclined to scoff at such a blatant adverbial redundancy. How else does one plod if not slowly? Well, the objection is undeniably true, but I can see how the redundancy is justified. Perhaps the author wanted to emphasize the old man's plodding by example. A sentence that's a little bit longer than it needs to be plods along. A sentence with a redundancy plods along. By burdening the sentence with a carefully considered redundancy, the author has imparted a sense of tempo to the old man's motion at very little cost. If it's your personal style to wield adverbs in this manner, cool! If you're a rulebound extremist who refuses to use an adverb at all cost...well, maybe you're a good speller.

One thing that irks me is the adverb-hater who desires to use an adverb, but then camouflages it in hopes of fooling somebody.

"I'll package each of your mother's statuettes with care."

"Do you mean you'll package them carefully?"

"Yes."

"Well then, why didn't you say that in the first place?"

Functionally, the phrase "with care" is a freakin' adverb. It won't fool me, but it might fool you. About the only time you're justified in using the "with [verb]" construct is when no equivalent adverb exists to get the job done right. You may write, "He ate the hot dog with relish." But you cannot write, "He ate the hod dog relish-ly. That is, unless you want to be a buffoon, like me!

Adverbs are like yield signs. Whenever you see one while you're proofreading your work, take a moment to look around for a better verb or a better idea. If none are to be found, continue along and be thankful the yield sign was there and nobody got hurt.

 

[sr71plt]

The use of exclamation marks is even more discouraged than the use of adverbs.

But, yes, not all adverbs end in "ly."

 

[PennLady]

Adverbs are like yield signs. Whenever you see one while you're proofreading your work, take a moment to look around for a better verb or a better idea. If none are to be found, continue along and be thankful the yield sign was there and nobody got hurt.

I also hate things like that -- "striding purposefully," for example. I suppose one could be striding without purpose, but then that seems to defeat the purpose (haha) of striding.

With my first few stories, I knew as I was writing that I was using words like "really" and "actually" too much. So what I did was to do a search and replace (really with "r," for example) and then I'd go through the story. Any time I found the replacement letter, I could figure out whether I wanted/needed to keep the word or not, and it was almost always "not," except in dialogue.

 

[snoopercharmbrights]

... You may write, "He ate the hot dog with relish." But you cannot write, "He ate the hod dog relish-ly. That is, unless you want to be a buffoon, like me! ...

This is a bad example because when I read "He ate the hot dog with relish." my first reaction was to interpret "relish" as a noun (as in "He ate the hot dog with corn relish.") and wonder what the problem was.

Try "She attacked like a Marine." because there is no adverb "Marinely", though some authors here on Lit would happily invent one.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Adverbs are shortcuts for readers and writers. Most people read at the 8th grade level with a street-ready vocabulary of 3000 words. Large vocabularies are luxuries they cant afford, cuz theyll never be used nor understood.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

The use of exclamation marks is even more discouraged than the use of adverbs.

But, yes, not all adverbs end in "ly."

For once I agree totally with sr.

Basically, this thread isn't really about ' adverbs' per se but a subset of adverbs of manner. Nobody will criticize (or even notice?) many adverbs of time - Tomorrow I'm going to Las Vegas - or adverbs of frequency - Usually I shop in Tiffany's. Let's not get into adverbial clauses.

Surely, there are two points here. Firstly, the ongoing struggle to suggest that dialogue tags are a curse to be avoided as much as possible and never made more important than the dialogue and secondly, the confusion between choice of verb and choice of adverb.

From an earlier post, yes, slowly is redundant in the phrase, "He plodded slowly across the road" but surely not in, "He walked slowly across the road"? Slowly modifies the second but is tautologous in the first.

Adverbs are the lifeblood of writing. Think, "she plays well, he runs very fast, now you tell me you want a divorce"

Just my 2c.

 

[mynameisben]

This is a bad example because when I read "He ate the hot dog with relish." my first reaction was to interpret "relish" as a noun (as in "He ate the hot dog with corn relish.") and wonder what the problem was.

I knew that when I wrote it.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

I knew that when I wrote it.

cos you got the grammar wrong. You should have said, " With relish, I ate the hot dog". Put your adverbs in the right place to convey your meaning.