Adverbial bravery



3 Comments

  1. rcalmy said,

    October 20, 2017 @ 7:22 am

    Timely. With NaNoWriMo almost upon us, there's the usual uptick in people giving advice on "good writing" that good writers don't actually follow.

  2. David Morris said,

    October 20, 2017 @ 4:03 pm

    One of my work tasks is to edit written passages to a strict word limit. I have often found that the last few words to go are adverbs or adjectives (or noun modifiers). This doesn't make them bad, and their removal good – it makes their removal (more) possible than other word classes. They can also be stacked up in ways not possible with other word classes (except for nouns in English tabloid headlines).

  3. Mark S said,

    October 21, 2017 @ 7:34 pm

    There's a science fiction short story, 'Cousin Len's Wonderful Adjective Cellar', by Jack Finney.

    Synopsis: A columnist purchases a second-hand adjective cellar, an instrument with the ability to remove adjectives and adverbs from his columns. ( From http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?78481 )

RSS feed for comments on this post