The Case Against Adverbs
visualthesaurus.com
visualthesaurus.com
First off, discriptivism is the only logical way to view language. Rules are meant to be broken, slowly, over a long period of time. You use "hopefully" (an adverb) completely incorrectly all the time. Get over the schoolmarm rules.
Secondly, this usage is purely fashion. Dostoevsky used them to excess, Hemingway did the opposite. Hemingway is cool these days; Dostoevsky is about as cool as that semicolon i just used.
Thirdly, proper writing is important, you should consider your audience more than you do these flame wars about adverbs and one or two spaces after a period.
Other than that, I largely agree with your broader points. Even when used, this should be a 'soft' rule and not a hard one. It can be ignored or purposely broken depending on the audience and tone of the work.
I think it's a good rule (or challenge or constraint) to give students who are starting to write, because mediocre authors can reach to adverbs as a cheap way to beef up their descriptions, and this becomes a crutch that prevents them from exercising other descriptive methods. I'm a fan of putting on other constraints as well (e.g. no 'internal' descriptions of emotions, only inferences from actions) in order to force them to develop other skills.
Adverbs are a useful language construct; if you teach people not to use them, they'll end up with a stilted grasp of writing rather than a balanced one.
For example, from the article:
> In our next class, I pointed out that using an adverb as a means of revealing a character's thoughts or actions was almost always a tip-off that the writer is telling instead of showing. For example, if I write:
> Nancy yelled angrily whenever someone questioned her.
>...I'm getting my point across by telling the reader how the character reacts. Sure, this might be just fine at times, but it's often better to write something like this:
> Nancy's boss approached holding the report she'd turned in the day before. She felt her heart start to race – what was the problem now? She'd met her deadline. The clients would be happy.
> "Hey, Nancy," Jim said. "I just wanted to ask you if you're sure this is ready to go out with the courier. Did you double-check it? Triple-check it?
> Nancy felt her face heat up, and the words were spilling out before she could stop herself. "What do you think, Jim?" she said, as she took a step towards him. "Did I remember the most basic component of submitting a report? Did I?"
But this is completely ignoring the negative effect: You've replaced one line with a dozen or more. You don't necessarily need this, some things in your story can be glossed over. If you don't want your book's word count to spiral out of control, maybe you need to cut some of this wasted text that's better represented by a simple adverb....
"Readers can't be shown everything that happens to a character, or novels would be 800 pages and cover 15 minutes in the protagonist's life. Sometimes adverbs help to move the story along through summary or time compression. But for young writers, learning to do without them is a good first practice."
Maybe this highlights the pitfalls of excessively long writing. Or more likely the pitfalls of me commenting at 3am :(
And the author admits it's only a heuristic, with exceptions, so they don't even disagree with you about the need to break rules at times.
It looked like a lecture from Rembrandt telling a young Matisse the "correct" way to paint.
Language wouldn't work at all without rules. The lack of rule enforcement for words like biweekly, biannually and bimonthly have made them functionally useless.
Not that it matters, but "biweekly", "biannually", and "bimonthly" have always only had a single meaning for me. I've heard the debate about them, but I don't think I've ever actually seen them used to mean "once every two weeks/months/years".
Every dictionary gives multiple definitions of biweekly, etc. To professional linguists, this is an example of the wonderful flowering of the diversity of language or whatever and is probably much more exciting to study. Everyone else just cares about when to pick up their paycheck.
As for those "bi-" words, there seems to be more consistency with "biannually", than with "biweekly", or "bimonthly". Oxford only gives a single definition for "biannual":
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/biannua...
As a professional linguist, there are millions of questions about language I find more exciting than this :)
The language you prefer is also exclusionary. Imagine if Ivy League universities used a complex idiosyncratic dialect that was opaque to anyone who didn't grow up in an upper-middle class New England suburb. It would create a barrier for outsiders to gain access to those colleges, and a lot of other elite institutions. Standardizing and simplifying rules eliminates that barrier, allows the language to be taught to people who would be otherwise marked as outsiders.
If you don't standardize the language, then it evolves to become unpredictable, inconsistent and impossible for non-natives to learn without years of immersion.
Imagine if Ivy League universities used a complex idiosyncratic dialect
English and all other languages on the planet are idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and impossible to learn without years of immersion. You can try to prescribe away some surface irregularity ("the singular of data is datum!"), with maybe limited success among a small network of people, but that won't even make a dent in the overall complexity of a language.
For fun, let's see if she breaks her own rule in the first sentence of that article.
As if trying to provide a good anecdote to open this very article, one of the students in my Fiction Writing Workshop got caught up in the adverb conundrum recently.
What EXACTLY is the problem with adverbs?
you've SURELY been told
try to explain better THE NEXT TIME we were together. (adverbial phrase)
and SURELY takes longer to write
we get to the destination [...] much more QUICKLY
Is that an adverbial phrase? The sentence doesn't work if you remove "the next time," but I don't know if that is a requirement. Normally adverbs and adverbial phrases can be removed without breaking the grammar of the sentence.
The author implies this is undesirable because it's obvious that it's snobbish, but it's really not. The sentence could have easily not been snobbish.
A good point in the comments was that the verb+adverb can often be replaced by another verb, eg. yelled angrily -> exploded.
I remember seeing a big issue raised with the adverbs in Harry Potter, but I don't remember any problems with its writing when I read all of those long ago.
Doing an adverb search over a document is a good idea. It is something I'm doing more routinely in my larger writing work now (but not HN comments, so please spin down the hypocrisy detectors, I'm not claiming perfection here). If an adverb disappears from a sentence and the most likely meaning is unchanged, toss it out. If on the other hand it puts an unexpected spin on the sentence (and "the degree to which something is unexpected" is a reasonable short summary of what something's information content is), it's equally important to leave it in.
When your adverbs simply reinforce the already-most-likely meaning, they are visual noise. When they draw you away from it, they can breathe life into the drollest of scenes.
Indeed. The same basic principle—get rid of junk—covers every other bit of text (or any composition, really). I don't like the essay because it fails to point it out and view adverbs as a specific hard-to-get-right case of this general rule. This muddles up the idea and makes it look more complex.
(Edit: tried to tidy up the form.)
The kinds of adverbs the author doesn't like are "he spoke worriedly" style, where you simply declare to the reader that the manner in which this action took place was worried. But you can do the same without an adverb, and many bad fiction writers do: "he spoke, his voice full of worry". No adverb, same problem.
And the piece itself gives some examples of why adverbs in other contexts are perfectly fine:
> try to explain better
> Let's say a writer fully describes the action
These are fine because they are not trying to declare a character's state/reactions. That's the issue; adverbs are a red herring.
I think the rule is overstated. It shouldn't be "never use adverbs," but "review every adverb to see if it can be improved."
For instance, one cannot really say something "snobbishly" because that isn't specific manner of talking; the content of the speech and the speaker's attitude may be snobbish, but that doesn't mean that the speech is executed in some manner that can be identified as a snobbish way of speaking. This is much like the adverb "furiously" in the famous sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"; the adverb doesn't apply to sleeping, which isn't furious. And in that sentence, the conflicting and inapplicable adjectives are not off the hook, either!
What a bunch of pedantic nonsense. Nobody who speaks English actually views the word "said" so narrowly.
'the content of the speech and the speaker's attitude may be snobbish, but that doesn't mean that the speech is executed in some manner that can be identified as a snobbish way of speaking.'
Yes it does. What planet are you from? An angry person talks in an angry way. A sad person talks sadly. A snobbish person will probably talk snobbishly. Did some English teacher who told you you can't end sentences in prepositions trick you into believing this?
Which more properly generalizes to: "do not use vague, semantically empty or inapplicable words"; there's really nothing special about adverbs in this.
> For instance, one cannot really say something "snobbishly" because that isn't specific manner of talking
Certainly such a description is not factual but a description of the subjective feeling created in a particular observer, nevertheless this not vague, semantically empty, or inapplicable in all cases (it might be inappropriate if the situation called for a simple factual description, but descriptions of events which include references to a particular observer's subjective reaction are not always unintended.)
> the content of the speech and the speaker's attitude may be snobbish, but that doesn't mean that the speech is executed in some manner that can be identified as a snobbish way of speaking.
"Attitude" is a subjective external interpretation of the internal motivation beyond the manner of doing something, the actual concrete way in which an "attitude" such as snobbishness manifests well may be in the manner in which speech is executed (it may also be in the content of the speech, or in the combination of the content and the manner.) So I would say that "saying X snobbishly" is both potentially valid and, while still subjective, one step less removed from a factual description than saying that the speakers attitude was snobbish at the time of the speech act.
About attitude being internal or external; the narrator may have the point of view of being able to "see" the internal attitude; I was more thinking of that, than the external signs of attitude. There is a problem with adverbs which confuse the two: the author intends the adverb to describe the internal state, yet that is not clear from the adverb itself. "said snobbishly": are we to imagine that as having been externally visible, or does it mean that his choice of words was guided by an inner sense of social superiority, but actually delivered dead pan.
A "sneering look of derision" is no less subjective, vague, etc., then "snobbishly". Yes, the first parts is a factual description of elements of the elements of the execution of the speech act which led to the conclusion that it was done "snobbishly", and might be more useful in certain circumstances. I already specifically acknowledged that there is a difference between objective factual descriptions of acts and subjective description of the impression an observer has of the act, and that "snobbishly"(like your "sneering look of derision") is clearly the latter, and inappropriate in context where the former is called for.
But it is communicates real information, and different real information than either the factual or the subjective component of your alternative, even when both "snobbishly" and your alternative might be accurate from the point of view of the observer reporting them. Neither is categorically improper, which is best depends on what the speaker intends to communicate.
today, tomorrow, yesterday, soon, then, now, once/twice/thrice/n times, there, here, hence, home (in constructions like "I took him home"), etc.
Honestly, they do nothing.
I assert: the mentality I exhibit in this thread is actually (!!!) that of someone who's read far too many ignorant, knee-jerk justifications of ill-thought-out (!!!) "rules" formulated and propagated by people who just don't know what they're talking about. As I said in a different comment, she even admits that she'd never really thought about the reasons behind the rule she so happily promulgates, and when asked about it she didn't even wonder, well, ARE adverbs so bad? No, she just ginned up some examples of bad writing that also employs adverbs.
Nancy yelled to express the anger she felt whenever someone questioned her.
"Well, I guess if you had grown up with it, you would understand polo", Minx said. Minx was a snob.
A dumping ground for what? Let me give you a hint, she replied as she doted on her wife. Did you get it yet, he responded, showing his zeal.
'Yesterday, Jane and Jimmy walked home.'
IMO people should use adverbs as literary scaffolding to get a thought down before later expanding on it (if expansion by the author is even necessary).
I don't have access to e.g. the AP or NYT style guides but I'll believe you that they ban temporal adverbs (which strikes me as excessive zeal; really, you can't say "earlier"?); I'm not sure why you think this is significant, since those guides are formulated with specific kinds of writing in mind, and the author is talking about fiction, in which it's totally ok to just say that something happened yesterday. And, of course, different institutions can have all sorts of crazy, hard-to-justify crap in their style guides---why not---house style can be idiosyncratic. The linked author is attempting to make a case to others; she isn't saying "here's how I do it" and she isn't representing a house style.
ETA in a quick search I was unable to find anything about temporal adverbs in particular in the Chicago Manual of Style.
"Can't tell you; words ending in -wise are adjectives!"
> Good writers go back and consider each adverb to make sure it's needed.
I've always resonated with the way Robert M. Pirsig describes it in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – good style is hard to nail down, but you know it when you see it. Better to show your students examples of (what you consider to be) good writing, hone their instincts as to what makes an enaging read, and get them to write as much as possible, in as many ways as possible.
[1] youtube.com/watch?v=xECUrlnXCqk