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Mark Twain: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” Stephen King: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs”. But what do they know about fiction? :)
by turuttituff2000 3y ago
Mark Twain: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.”
Stephen King: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs”.
But what do they know about fiction? :)
- crossroadsguy 3y agoStephen King once said, “Ms Rowling seems to have never met one [adverbs] she didn't like" But what would Rowling know about storytelling :) I have never even read Rowling, nor have I read King. But such restrictions and imposing of so called “rules”, or what is good what is not, are absurd when comes art. I would urge anyone to not let such decrees by the famous to dictate their style, let alone a software.
- turuttituff2000 3y agoWhatever rocks your art. Being especially careful with adverbs and adjectives is common practice among experienced writers. More examples: “Adjectives are frequently the greatest enemy of the substantive.” – Voltaire “[I was taught] to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations.” – Ernest Hemingway “The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.” – Clifton Paul Fadiman “[The adjective] is the one part of speech first seized upon and worked to death by novices and inferior writers.” – J.I. Rodale “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.” – Ezra Pound “The adjective has not been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” – E.B. White “[Whoever writes in English] is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective.” – George Orwell “Most adjectives are also unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun.” – William Zissner