Language Log

My post at Lingua Franca this week critiqued the following extraordinarily dumb piece of writing advice from Macmillan Dictionary Blog:

Try this exercise: Go through a piece of writing, ideally an essay of your own. Delete all adverbs and adverbial phrases, all those "surprisingly", "interestingly", "very", "extremely", "fortunately", "on the other hand", "almost invariably". (While you are at it, also score out those clauses that frame the content, like "we may consider that", "it is likely that", "there is a possibility that".)

Question 1: have you lost any content?
Question 2: is it easier to read?

Usually the meaning is still exactly the same but the piece is far easier to read.

As you might expect, I concentrated on adverbs. I didn't comment on the fact that one of the "adverbs and adverbial phrases" cited is nothing of the sort.

In a message about the "excruciatingly slow internet speed in China" that I privately circulated to some friends, students, and colleagues, I made the statement that "in many cases that I have personally experienced, the internet speed in China is actually hundreds of times slower than it is in the United States and elsewhere in the world."  Geoff Wade wrote back to me:  "Grammatical question: can something be hundreds of times slower than anything else?"