Should we brazenly ditch the adverb? For those who spotted the nerdy linguistic pun in that question, my bias may be already abundantly clear.
But maybe I'm wrong. Plenty of writers offer lexical advice - both solicited and not. The adverb gets people weirdly fired up; many are less fond of it than me. I spent recent months devouring writing about writing as I complete the first draft of my first novel, so the recurring themes are fresh in my sun-kissed skull.
I'm not the only one. The internet lit up when in November Jonathan Franzen wrote 10 “rules for novelists”. His pompous, random rules were widely – and deservedly – lampooned. They reek of superciliousness. Number eight, for example, is: “Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.” Which would make adverbs yet more essential; if “plodding” is uninteresting, then the “slowly” of “walked slowly” becomes crucial.
It's always worth re-evaluating the language we use to describe our world. The exhilarating thing about linguistics to any word-lover is the pace at which it reinvents itself: even faster than Madonna in the 90s. Australian journalist Tiger Webb recently wrote an entire piece advocating the abolition of the apostrophe, in which it was characterised as “the hoity toity squiggle”.
After an intense stint of reading about writing, the chorus calling for a ban – or at the very least, a vast reduction of usage of the words to qualify verbs or adjectives – now feels too loud to ignore.
Stephen King leads the charge for the abolition. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs,” he writes in 2000's On Writing “and I will shout it from the rooftops.” Note he won't shout loudly – that's known as a pleonasm, when more words than necessary are used. It's the chief criticism of the adverb: stripping interesting verbs like “shout” of their punch. The tautology can come across as immature.
Read Full Article »
