Mind Your Adverbs

I’m sure if you’ve done any reading about good writing, you’ve come across advice that suggests that you should be careful with descriptive words. It is a common criticism of novice writers’ work that the prose is over-littered with adjectives. However, the problem lies more, in my opinion, in the liberal use of adverbs. What’s the difference?

At the most basic level, an adjective describes a noun or pronoun whilst an adverb describes or modifies everything else. Although this is a crude and elementary definition, and of course, it can get a little more complicated than this, this simple distinction is enough to help most people determine which is which.

Often the biggest problems lie with adverbs that end in –ly (i.e., quickly), rather than simple adjectives like red.

For example, you will often see sentences written something like:  He quickly grabbed his briefcase and ran out the door. Or: Excitedly, she ripped open the envelope.

I’ve done this myself, particularly on first drafts, and I think it is born of a need to try to make clear to the reader how something was done. As writers, we want the reader to understand completely how we see the scene unfolding. But there are two things to consider. First, the reader is often more capable of understanding this from the context, and, second, there is often a much better, more interesting, way to get the information across.

Let’s take another look at the first of the examples above: He quickly grabbed his briefcase and ran out the door.  Here, quickly is the villain. Quickly is an adverb, and in this case, totally unnecessary. The word grabbed already implies a quick action, so quickly adds nothing to the action. In fact, this is often true of many of the adverbs that are over-used.

The same is true of the second example. Ripped, in this context, implies that the action is performed with either great excitement or, possibly, anger. You might think that excitedly informs the reader of which, but, if you consider the rest of the prose, it is likely that clues to which are already present.

Readers are often intelligent enough to ‘get it’ from the rest of the text. For example, if the protagonist of this sentence had already been known to be waiting for the results of a recent interview, then ripped implies that she opens the envelope in a state of high excitement. On the other hand, if she was dreading the results, another verb would tell us this, such as hesitated (She hesitated as she opened the envelope).  Finally, the context might have made the action so clear that you may not need any verb other than a simple opened.

If you find that your writing is criticised for having too many adjectives or adverbs, or if you simply want to avoid this criticism, take a look back at your prose. You might find that you can either remove the offending element, or reconsider the active verb, and you should find that your writing is a lot clearer and much improved.

Of course, you can also have too many adjectives: the big bad brown angry bear. Again, a little judicious pruning might improve your prose. Of course, you may also be guilty of lazy word choices. For example, a huge stone, could be written as: a boulder. And, it would be wise to be careful with all of your descriptive terms.

But, in my experience, adverbs are the greatest villains so mind your adverbs!