By Sarah Chauncey
The road to hell is paved with adverbs. — Stephen King, On Writing
The road to purgatory is paved with adjectives. — Lianne, a former writing colleague
Readers don’t like being told what to think, feel or perceive. They want to have an experience, and our job is to use words that facilitate that experience. We all experience the world—including books and stories—through the filters of our own experience and conditioning, so it requires skill and practice to evoke the response we’re going for, whether that’s compassion for your protagonist, fear at their predicament, or swooning over a meet-cute.
Adjectives and adverbs are the junk food of writing; an abundance of them is a sign that we haven’t spent the necessary time selecting verbs or nouns. For the most part, if we’ve chosen a strong noun, an adjective is redundant. The same goes for adverbs and verbs.
This isn’t an indictment! Adjectives and adverbs are not universally “bad,” but they can weaken the impact of strong writing. And each of those modifiers comes in two types, one more useful to writers than the other.
The two types of adjectives: descriptive and interpretive.
Descriptive adjectives, like serpentine highway or sulphurous smell use reasonably objective words to describe the facts of the situation. We can usually agree on what serpentine looks like, or sulphur smells like.
Interpretive adjectives are the author’s opinions—beautiful, ugly, uncomfortable, problematic. Those are subjective; the reader’s interpretation may differ significantly from the writer’s.
Interpretive adjectives impose the writer’s judgments—which a reader may or may not share.
Descriptive adjectives are more useful: they bring the reader more deeply into the world of a story. If we share our opinions—interpretive adjectives—we’re only connecting with the reader’s mind. Descriptive adjectives connect with readers’ hearts by triggering mirror neurons, allowing the reader to project herself into a given scene, becoming more fully absorbed in a book.
In early drafts, we often use interpretive adjectives to describe people—summarizing our opinion—when characterization would be a stronger choice. Instead of saying the manager had a strong male ego, did he walk with a swagger, or put his feet on his desk while talking to you (or even more evocative, did he lean back and put his feet on your desk?). Bring people to life with actions, not adjectives.
Descriptive adjectives must still be carefully chosen. “Ocean” blue could more aptly be azure, cerulean or aquamarine, depending on which part of the world we’re in and what season it is. A “leaky” faucet might be dripping, streaming or flowing. “Tall trees” and “dense fog” are descriptive, but a tall birch tree in New England isn’t the same as an iconic, millennium-old kauri New Zealand, or an enchanting redwood in California. Sometimes the strongest choice of all is to use a metaphor, or describe the experience of the tree (did you get a crick in your neck from looking up at it?).
There are also useful and not-so-useful adverbs.
Orienting adverbs refer to time/space orientation and almost never end in “-ly.” These adverbs help in transitions from scene to scene (“Afterwards, we went to the party”), or in orienting the reader (“As she walked along the beach, a flock of gulls flew overhead.”)
Lazy adverbs, often those ending in “-ly” and words like “very” or “super-”) are less useful. These adverbs have no absolute meaning in and of themselves. It’s up to the reader to interpret what “really,” “super” or “very” means: “Heather was really excited for her first horseback riding lesson.” Interpretation of this depends on what “really” means to Heather, the character.
It’s rare that a sentence requires a lazy adverb in order for the reader to understand the meaning. But sometimes they bring needed emphasis. Consider the sentence, “Aimee was particularly fond of California rolls.”
Here, deleting the adverb makes the sentence more muddy. “Aimee was fond of California rolls,” while true, lacks the clarity of the earlier version. “Particularly” clarifies that Aimee likes California rolls more than other types of sushi.
Exercise: Check your modifiers. By cutting all adverbs from a document, we can see where we absolutely (!) need them.
- Take an essay, an article, or a chapter you’re working on, and Save As a new document.
- Identify and delete all the adverbs.
- Read through and see how it looks. Does your writing come across as more confident and bolder? Are any sentences less clear?
- If you’re missing orienting adverbs, or a transition seems abrupt or unclear, go ahead and bring the adverb back.
- If there are descriptions that now seem weak, consider how you might strengthen it without using an adverb. Would a metaphor work better? If you’re writing about a person, could you use characterization through actions?
- Now highlight every adjective in the document, and identify whether each is descriptive or interpretive.
- If it’s descriptive, can you choose a stronger, more descriptive noun?
- If it’s interpretive, consider alternate ways of communicating the information. If you’ve written, for example, that a situation was scary, how can you create that experience for the reader, so she feels the fear on your behalf?
By going through this process, you can see where you need-need modifiers. In the process, you’ll tighten up the rest of your writing—perspicaciously.