12 ms·

The Case Against Adverbs

• molbioguy 12y ago
  I dismissed this article quickly and summarily! Adverbs are important and their loss in everyday speech (where I often notice it) is annoying.
  • lionsdan 12y ago
    They are also valuable for Tom Swifties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swifty#Examples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swifty#Examples
  • kazinator 12y ago
    I read it eagerly, receptively at first, but then eventually it became glaringly obvious that I must conclude the reading dismissively.
  • psychometry 12y ago
    Perhaps if you hadn't dismissed the article so quickly, you'd have realized that it's not about everyday speech but rather written prose. Try again.
• hackcasual 12y ago
  This is a good starting point from someone who studies language: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4487 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4487 For fun, let's see if she breaks her own rule in the first sentence of that article. As if trying to provide a good anecdote to open this very article, one of the students in my Fiction Writing Workshop got caught up in the adverb conundrum recently. Almost made it, but fucked up at the end there with "recently".
  • kenko 12y ago
    Also the locative adverb "up".
    • psychometry 12y ago
      No, the "up" in "caught up" is part of a phrasal verb. It's not an adverb.
    • cema 12y ago
      It's not locative but part of a phrase verb "catch up with".
  • kenko 12y ago
    Further easily-caught sins: What EXACTLY is the problem with adverbs? you've SURELY been told try to explain better THE NEXT TIME we were together. (adverbial phrase) and SURELY takes longer to write we get to the destination [...] much more QUICKLY I mean, lots of the uses of the dreaded -ly adverbs the author identifies are also instances of bad writing, but so what? Are they bad writing because they contain adverbs? Surely (!!!) one could easily (!!!) find plenty of instances of good adverb-containing writing. This sounds like a very ad-hoc justification of a rule that the author admits to never have even examined!
    • baddox 12y ago
      > try to explain better THE NEXT TIME we were together. (adverbial phrase) Is that an adverbial phrase? The sentence doesn't work if you remove "the next time," but I don't know if that is a requirement. Normally adverbs and adverbial phrases can be removed without breaking the grammar of the sentence.
      • kenko 12y ago
        The whole phrase would really be "the next time we were together" but I wanted to give the ol' shifting finger a rest. (My caps lock is unmapped.)
  • kelukelugames 12y ago
    I also don't like the "up" in "caught up". Claude Shannon is rolling in his grave.
    • psychometry 12y ago
      What's wrong with "caught up"? It's perfectly grammatical. And what does that have to do with Claude Shannon?
• kenko 12y ago
  I can't wait to eliminate from my writing such pesky, "tell not show" adverbs as the following: today, tomorrow, yesterday, soon, then, now, once/twice/thrice/n times, there, here, hence, home (in constructions like "I took him home"), etc. Honestly, they do nothing.
  • thaumaturgy 12y ago
    The programmer mentality: any suggested guideline must immediately fit all possible test cases or it is wrong.
    • kenko 12y ago
      Locative and temporal adverbs are a very large, very useful class of adverbs. I admit that the author does mention adverbs ending in "-ly" as being particularly troublesome, but she doesn't say why just those are so bad. I assert: the mentality I exhibit in this thread is actually (!!!) that of someone who's read far too many ignorant, knee-jerk justifications of ill-thought-out (!!!) "rules" formulated and propagated by people who just don't know what they're talking about. As I said in a different comment, she even admits that she'd never really thought about the reasons behind the rule she so happily promulgates, and when asked about it she didn't even wonder, well, ARE adverbs so bad? No, she just ginned up some examples of bad writing that also employs adverbs.
      • kenko 12y ago
        I mean, I could just as easily have come to the conclusion that nouns and adjectives deserve close scrutiny with the following examples: Nancy yelled to express the anger she felt whenever someone questioned her. It's hilarious, incidentally, that she contrasts the adverb-involving sentence "Nancy yelled angrily ..." with a much fuller scene of several sentences containing dialogue between two characters. Big surprise that there are significant differences there. "Well, I guess if you had grown up with it, you would understand polo", Minx said. Minx was a snob. A dumping ground for what? Let me give you a hint, she replied as she doted on her wife. Did you get it yet, he responded, showing his zeal. ... looking at the article again, I think support for the contention that she doesn't know what she's talking about can be found in her description of "thanks so much" as involving an adverb that modifies an adjective.
• charlieflowers 12y ago
  I expected to find the article silly, but I found it pretty solid. I think each point it makes about adverbs (as it applies to fiction writing) is pretty convincing. For example, adverbs often do "tell" instead of "show." I think the rule is overstated. It shouldn't be "never use adverbs," but "review every adverb to see if it can be improved."
  • kazinator 12y ago
    It should be, "do not use vague, semantically empty or inapplicable adverbs". For instance, one cannot really say something "snobbishly" because that isn't specific manner of talking; the content of the speech and the speaker's attitude may be snobbish, but that doesn't mean that the speech is executed in some manner that can be identified as a snobbish way of speaking. This is much like the adverb "furiously" in the famous sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"; the adverb doesn't apply to sleeping, which isn't furious. And in that sentence, the conflicting and inapplicable adjectives are not off the hook, either!
    • jimmaswell 12y ago
      'For instance, one cannot really say something "snobbishly" because that isn't specific manner of talking' What a bunch of pedantic nonsense. Nobody who speaks English actually views the word "said" so narrowly. 'the content of the speech and the speaker's attitude may be snobbish, but that doesn't mean that the speech is executed in some manner that can be identified as a snobbish way of speaking.' Yes it does. What planet are you from? An angry person talks in an angry way. A sad person talks sadly. A snobbish person will probably talk snobbishly. Did some English teacher who told you you can't end sentences in prepositions trick you into believing this?
      • kazinator 12y ago
        A person who believes to be socially superior could very well deliver their veiled insults using a cheerful and friendly external attitude. "snobbishly" doesn't really communicate anything specific. Is it referring to the speaker's inner belief? Or something about the face he is making while speaking? Body language? Tone? Especially, if the intent is to make a narrative remark that casts some kind of judgment or observation upon the content of the quotation, then the adverb is not a very good vehicle for that.
• deleted 12y ago
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• jimmaswell 12y ago
  ""Well, I guess if you had grown up with it, you would understand polo," Minx said snobbishly." The author implies this is undesirable because it's obvious that it's snobbish, but it's really not. The sentence could have easily not been snobbish. A good point in the comments was that the verb+adverb can often be replaced by another verb, eg. yelled angrily -> exploded. I remember seeing a big issue raised with the adverbs in Harry Potter, but I don't remember any problems with its writing when I read all of those long ago.
  • jedberg 12y ago
    The author assumes there is a paragraph before that sentence that describes his snobbish behavior.
• scoofy 12y ago
  Philosophy of Language graduate here (though a linguist may be more appropriate). First off, discriptivism is the only logical way to view language. Rules are meant to be broken, slowly, over a long period of time. You use "hopefully" (an adverb) completely incorrectly all the time. Get over the schoolmarm rules. Secondly, this usage is purely fashion. Dostoevsky used them to excess, Hemingway did the opposite. Hemingway is cool these days; Dostoevsky is about as cool as that semicolon i just used. Thirdly, proper writing is important, you should consider your audience more than you do these flame wars about adverbs and one or two spaces after a period.
  • lmkg 12y ago
    Grammar rules should certainly be descriptive, no argument there. But the proscription against adverbs is a stylistic rule, not a grammatical one. Arguing descriptive vs prescriptive on a rule of style doesn't make much sense to me; isn't the point of style rules to be prescriptive? Other than that, I largely agree with your broader points. Even when used, this should be a 'soft' rule and not a hard one. It can be ignored or purposely broken depending on the audience and tone of the work. I think it's a good rule (or challenge or constraint) to give students who are starting to write, because mediocre authors can reach to adverbs as a cheap way to beef up their descriptions, and this becomes a crutch that prevents them from exercising other descriptive methods. I'm a fan of putting on other constraints as well (e.g. no 'internal' descriptions of emotions, only inferences from actions) in order to force them to develop other skills.
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • adwf 12y ago
    I was about to say the exact same thing. A lot of rules of writing happen to be current trends in literature, not actual hard and fast rules. Adverbs are a useful language construct; if you teach people not to use them, they'll end up with a stilted grasp of writing rather than a balanced one. For example, from the article: > In our next class, I pointed out that using an adverb as a means of revealing a character's thoughts or actions was almost always a tip-off that the writer is telling instead of showing. For example, if I write: > Nancy yelled angrily whenever someone questioned her. >...I'm getting my point across by telling the reader how the character reacts. Sure, this might be just fine at times, but it's often better to write something like this: > Nancy's boss approached holding the report she'd turned in the day before. She felt her heart start to race – what was the problem now? She'd met her deadline. The clients would be happy. > "Hey, Nancy," Jim said. "I just wanted to ask you if you're sure this is ready to go out with the courier. Did you double-check it? Triple-check it? > Nancy felt her face heat up, and the words were spilling out before she could stop herself. "What do you think, Jim?" she said, as she took a step towards him. "Did I remember the most basic component of submitting a report? Did I?" But this is completely ignoring the negative effect: You've replaced one line with a dozen or more. You don't necessarily need this, some things in your story can be glossed over. If you don't want your book's word count to spiral out of control, maybe you need to cut some of this wasted text that's better represented by a simple adverb....
• readymade 12y ago
  These kind of injunctions do more harm that good, I think. Style is incredibly variable, changes with the tides, and rarely follows any well defined set of rules. I've always resonated with the way Robert M. Pirsig describes it in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – good style is hard to nail down, but you know it when you see it. Better to show your students examples of (what you consider to be) good writing, hone their instincts as to what makes an enaging read, and get them to write as much as possible, in as many ways as possible.
• jerf 12y ago
  It seems to me nobody has properly explained the issue, including the original article or any of the comments so far. The problem with adverbs is best viewed through the lens of information theory. In the sentence ""Well, I guess if you had grown up with it, you would understand polo," Minx said snobbishly.", the reason snobbishly is a useless adverb is that absent any other context, the most likely way in which that sentence was said was snobbishly. Yes, it is true that the sentence may not have been said snobbishly... in that case, use the adverb because it will be adding information. For instance, I can imagine that the sentence was said "sweetly", in which case we are not probably in a very sarcastic context. "Flatly" puts another spin on it. Etc. Doing an adverb search over a document is a good idea. It is something I'm doing more routinely in my larger writing work now (but not HN comments, so please spin down the hypocrisy detectors, I'm not claiming perfection here). If an adverb disappears from a sentence and the most likely meaning is unchanged, toss it out. If on the other hand it puts an unexpected spin on the sentence (and "the degree to which something is unexpected" is a reasonable short summary of what something's information content is), it's equally important to leave it in. When your adverbs simply reinforce the already-most-likely meaning, they are visual noise. When they draw you away from it, they can breathe life into the drollest of scenes.
  • goblin89 12y ago
    > If an adverb disappears from a sentence and the most likely meaning is unchanged, toss it out. Indeed. The same basic principle—get rid of junk—covers every other bit of text (or any composition, really). I don't like the essay because it fails to point it out and view adverbs as a specific hard-to-get-right case of this general rule. This muddles up the idea and makes it look more complex. (Edit: tried to tidy up the form.)
• stevewilhelm 12y ago
  That was particularly informative. [1] [1] youtube.com/watch?v=xECUrlnXCqk
• jmathes 12y ago
  This seems like a great article, but I missed the part where it's relevant to hacker news. Did the community's focus shift or broaden in the months I've been away?
• _delirium 12y ago
  I think this is good stylistic advice, but unfortunately muddled by the use of the word "adverb" to label it. The author is polemicizing against heavy-handed declarations to the reader of a character's emotional state, reactions, etc. That is not the same issue as using adverbs: many adverbs aren't involved in that kind of construction, and many of those kinds of constructions don't even use adverbs. The kinds of adverbs the author doesn't like are "he spoke worriedly" style, where you simply declare to the reader that the manner in which this action took place was worried. But you can do the same without an adverb, and many bad fiction writers do: "he spoke, his voice full of worry". No adverb, same problem. And the piece itself gives some examples of why adverbs in other contexts are perfectly fine: > try to explain better > Let's say a writer fully describes the action These are fine because they are not trying to declare a character's state/reactions. That's the issue; adverbs are a red herring.