Writing: News from the front in the war on adverbs · 5:11pm Jan 6th, 2014
Mark Liberman blogged on Slate (Stop Hating on Adjectives and Adverbs) about repeated advice from experts to eliminate adverbs & adjectives. Like this:
So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to avoid adverbs and adjectives (Zinsser 2006). Adjectives and adverbs sprinkle paper with unnecessary clutter. This clutter does not convey information but distracts and has no point especially in academic writing, say, as opposed to literary prose or poetry.
—Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, Scientometrics 2013, Cluttered writing: adjectives and adverbs in academia
When you catch an adjective, kill it.
—Mark Twain, in a letter
Mark wrote a Python script to count what fraction of words were adverbs & adjectives in these texts:
Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford ("It was a dark and stormy night"), first chapter: .117
Jacques Derrida's Chapter 2 of Of Grammatology, selected for its unreadability: .139
Zinsser, On Writing Well (advises avoiding adverbs & adjectives): .128
Mark Twain's death-to-adjectives letter: .141
Okulicz-Kozaryn, "Cluttered writing: adjectives and adverbs in academia": .158
I don't know exactly what the Python NLTK module counts as an adverb or adjective. Those all sound high to me. But we see that the three writers complaining about adverbs & adjectives used a lot of them even as they complained about them. (I notice the title of "Cluttered writing" is 50% adjectives. 
)
One problem with adverbs is that so many of them end in -ly that it gives a repetitive sound to a paragraph, particularly when adverbs end sentences. Erin Brenner claims in When Adverbs Fall Flat that this is the destructive work of eighteenth-century grammarians, who set about converting all non-Latinate English words to -ly forms to make them more like Latin.
Now I want a big list of pre-conversion adverbs to put in my toolbox. I could at least try using them for Luna.
Also, Eighteenth and Nineteenth century prescriptivists have left such an annoying legacy.
I can understand trying to reign adverb usage in. Over-use of adverbs can result in lazy sounding writing. Completely eliminating them though, as well as adjectives, just makes a story sound boring. And is damn near impossible anyway.
I wouldn't think fictional writing would count as academic writing?
The problem isn't actually adverbs and adjectives, but unnecessary adverbs and adjectives. Many such words do indeed convey additional information to the reader.
I think it is like the terrible "show, don't tell" advice; telling is very important, and adverbs and adjectives are very useful, but incorrect versions of the "rules" get passed down to people because, well, it is simpler saying "Don't do X" than it is to actually explain the proper rules.
Also, frankly, most scientific papers are not actually written very well. It may be true that social sciences papers are even worse than non-social sciences papers, but a lot of upper level, say, biology papers are nigh unreadable by anyone other than an expert - and even the experts have to spend time deciphering them.
Now, it is true that some things are just inherently complicated and obscure, and some amount of impossibility is inevitable in such, but I think a lot of papers really aren't written in the most readable ways.
But that is neither here nor there.
It's an odd thing, but to hear English spoken in a more anglo-saxon manner makes it feel very childish and unlearned. Some element of our education seems to create this impression that the saxon-sounding elements of English are something to be ejected as soon as possible.
I'm tempted to go through one of my fics and replace all the adverbs with flat equivalents, and see what happens. It suspect it may be powerful shocking.
I like what Stephen King (and by extension Strunk and White) thought on the subject: Don't use them, unless you know you are going to win. You must be confident in your adverb usage. I must say however, I will (almost) never use an -ly adverb, as I find them to be lazy. I may even need to use more words to describe an action, but for the most part, I hate -ly adverbs.
Excessive descriptors can detract from a story, it's true, but the operative word there is excessive. Some are necessary to make the text evocative and engaging. Otherwise, it's just kind of... there. Either flat or filled with awkward phrasing designed to take the place of the forbidden parts of speech. Moderation is key.
1689197 It's possible to eliminate adverbs. Elmore Leonard, as far as I can see, uses none. But he writes in a third person limited that is almost first-person — he uses the same dialect and grammar mistakes in his narrative that his main characters use in their speech. He wants a quick and snappy feel more than he wants detail, and adverbs and adjectives aren't as quick and snappy as verbs and nouns.
Interesting question, though: Does dialogue have adverbs and adjectives? Most people don't use descriptive adverbs or adjectives. Their talk is all business: Go here, do that. But they use a super-abundance of crappy non-descript adverbs and adjectives: "He's just really annoying, talking about his dumb old Camaro all the time" (and the Camaro is probably neither dumb nor old), "It was awesome, I really loved it." And if they use descriptive adjectives, they use them in the wordiest way possible, saying "X is Y" instead of "Y X": "That's the lake. It's really cold." Nobody says "I'm going out for a stroll in the chilly evening air"; yet nobody writes "He went out. Down Maple. To the druggist. It was chilly. About ten, yeah, late, late."
(It's almost as if "write well" means "write using these rules that are completely unlike speech, to prove you're a writer and not just an ordinary person trying to write", like the fancy artificial speech patterns of lords and ladies, doctors, lawyers, and other nobility that let them catch fakers. Elmore Leonard is one of those guys whose dialogue people say is like real dialogue, but it isn't, at all, if you compare it.)
I'm fond of adjectives, myself. What drives me crazy is the over use of qualifiers. Take a bold statement, such as "It was the biggest." Now qualify it "It was possibly among the biggest in recent history." Yes, "It was the biggest" is hyperbolic and inaccurate, but tacking on too many qualifiers waters it down until it's meaningless. It would be better to just not mention the big thing in the first place.
1689295
Goddamn it, I had a nice big reply, then my browser shut when I dropped my mouse. Again. Seconds away from hitting send. I can't remember what I was going to say.
I don't suppose you know why it would do that, without asking to close, with multiple tabs open, do you?
In fairness to Okulicz-Kozaryn, he's talking about academic papers, not fiction. When you're writing a thesis on the properties of powder coating as a means of corrosion prevention (example chosen because I just helped a friend edit his master's thesis on this topic a few weeks ago), adjectives and adverbs stand out and are almost always to your paper's detriment (as his poor writing skills attested).
I just watch for 'echoes'.
If that sound, 'ly', keeps poppin' up over and over in a paragraph or worse, a sentence, it'll jump out. Jumping out is bad. Ideally stuff should just read like butter, and that means using adverbs and adjectives when it would be more awkward NOT to use 'em.
Also, obvious adverbs are lame, but when you can surprise with 'em they're awesome. Once I wrote a line about Pinkie in bed with Fluttershy fooling around, and they were slowly getting their thing going but for starters they were resting 'reverently'. It set up a burst of purpley sentimental prose but there really wasn't a better way to say 'right now these ponies are not only blissed out and turned on, but they're also marvelling at their good fortune and more than a lil' bit worshipful of each other. They're in awe, like it's too good to be true'.
Not that it lasted, but hey, Trixieverse
The RIGHT adverb can be the best possible word to use. They suck when they're like ketchup, splorted indiscriminately onto everything.
1689335 That happens when you've accidentally stumbled onto one of the True Rules of Fiction. The Internet Service Providers Guild, acting on behalf of their sister society, the Writer's Guild (which, like the NSA and the US Postal Service, are just part of the Thurn & Taxis secret society that controls worldwide communication) filters that out and forwards it to the appropriate people instead.
In fact, I see your complete text has just arrived in my inbox now. Flagged "sensitive". Be careful next time you fly anywhere.
"So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing?"
Um. Aren't 'clean' and 'scientific' and 'readable' all adjectives that adjust the noun 'writing' for the better? Not that I know anything about writing things without loops structures and defined variables.
This sounds like the running debate on running shoes. I run, so I know a bit about this personally.
Somehow the thesis goes from "running shoes are overpriced and don't deliver on the promises of their advertising" (true) to "SHOES ARE EVIL AND WE SHOULD ALL RUN BAREFOOT" (true until you step on a rusty nail).
A similar thing has gone on in dietary circles. It began with "gluten is bad for people with celiac disease" (true) and somehow wound up at "GLUTEN IS EVIL AND IF YOU FEED YOUR CHILD BREAD YOU ARE AN AWFUL PARENT" (another drone strike in the Mommy Wars).
It would be interesting to imagine what Karl Marx might say about this hatred of bread and shoes among people who have never known the want of either, but we can't stop for that.
So now with adjectives and adverbs. We proceed from "too many of them are bad" (true), to "I try to use as few as possible" (well enough) to "NOBODY SHOULD USE THEM AND ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH ME IS MIDDLDEBROW*")
Yet as the numbers show (and thank you, Bad Horse, for noting this), life without adjectives or adverbs is as difficult to achieve as life without bread or shoes. Especially, it seems, for those exhorting us to do without (Okulicz-Kozaryn .158 -- but a great third baseman I hear).
"As some strict down-looked men pretend to fast/ Who yet in closets eat..." Whence comes this mania for setting yourself up as better than your neighbor, because you deny yourself things he uses innocently and daily? I blame Generation X because everybody does. In fact just the other day I found a very witty song that skewers their affectations:
(Really, who is this Gilbert N. Sullivan? Does he have a Twitter feed?)
*Academic term for "a big ol' poopy-head"
1689970 I knew JME would have known who Frederick was!
Authors of literature usually aim for immersion. Speakers in natural dialogue usually do not. I've noticed with your Last Unicorn excerpt that adjectives and adverbs hugely influence my reading pace, and that pace is critical in allowing me to put myself into the scene. When people speak naturally, they're trying to get their point across quickly and effectively, and that means not letting the listener get hung up on details. Words like "good" and "awesome" are ones we can just glance over and get the general emotion trying to be conveyed, which is all people really go for when speaking naturally.
For what it's worth, I believe people use more adjectives and adverbs when trying to be persuasive, or when relaying some interesting event.
.158 as in 15.8%? Because that's not all that much, and a whole lot less than 50%. Unless I suck at numbers.
1690233
The 50% was referring to the title "Cluttered writing".
1690121
1689295
Well, we all know that unicorns invented table manners so that earth ponies and pegasi couldn't eat in polite company. And then those blasted griffins came along with FINGERS.
Jerks.
Anyway, as far as this goes... I think this is true of all languages, actually (or at the very least, it is true of French and Chinese), but I don't think it actually has to do with being haughty. I think it has to do with the fact that reading and speaking aren't the same thing. Take, for instance, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It has things in it like:
That's not at all what anyone would say in reality, and indeed, there are lots of written works which sound terrible when read out loud, but which read wonderfully - a lot of very broken-up language, short, choppy sentences, work in this way. They can be very effective in a literary work, but don't work well when spoken out loud.
There are many other, similar techniques which are very prevalent in prose which rely on the fact that reading and speaking aren't at all the same, and we don't absorb them in the exact same way, and as such, things work in reading which don't work in speech, and a lot of speech, when written out, doesn't read as very strong prose.
I mean, I think there is SOME aspect of this - look at the guy who was on the Pulitizer Prize committee and the absolutely terrible prose HE thought was awesome, BECAUSE it was... well, the kind of prose most people wouldn't write (because it is horrible).
1689658
SHHH. We're not suppose to tell anyone, remember?
*coughs* I mean, nothing to see here folks.
1689295
It's been a long time since I read Elmore Leonard (and I never read any of his westerns), but while his dialogue may be unreal, it really fits the mood and character of his books. I really think it's one of his strengths, imho. It may not be realistic, but it's believable, yanno?
1691348 I didn't mean it as a criticism. His dialogue is great. It just isn't what people actually talk like. Probably I brought it up intending to make the point that, if people don't use descriptive adjectives much in their speech, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use them in prose.
Just a few odd notes:
"Scientometrics" and "Grammatology" sound like what your ship's science officer would have studied studied if your ship were a steam-powered dirigible.
But all it returned was:
spam
spam
spam
spam
baked beans
spam