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'Yesterday, Jane and Jimmy walked home.' You are literally adding fuel to the prescriptivist fire. Locative and temporal adverbs are (rightfully) banned from f
by rmrfrmrf 12y ago
'Yesterday, Jane and Jimmy walked home.'
You are literally adding fuel to the prescriptivist fire. Locative and temporal adverbs are (rightfully) banned from formal and news writing because they're useless or redundant at best and misleading at worst ('Yesterday, August 7, 2014, an unidentified driver crashed into a family of five heading home.' vs. 'August 7, 2014: an unidentified driver crashed into a family of five at the intersection of Main St and Governor Blvd in Albany, NY.'). In creative works, there's more lenience, but it's usually due to a character being the narrator or informal dialogue.
IMO people should use adverbs as literary scaffolding to get a thought down before later expanding on it (if expansion by the author is even necessary).
- kenko 12y agoYes, if you're giving the actual date, the relative time from the time of utterance is redundant, and if you aren't, it's misleading because you can't make sense of it without knowing the date of utterance. I don't have access to e.g. the AP or NYT style guides but I'll believe you that they ban temporal adverbs (which strikes me as excessive zeal; really, you can't say "earlier"?); I'm not sure why you think this is significant, since those guides are formulated with specific kinds of writing in mind, and the author is talking about fiction, in which it's totally ok to just say that something happened yesterday. And, of course, different institutions can have all sorts of crazy, hard-to-justify crap in their style guides---why not---house style can be idiosyncratic. The linked author is attempting to make a case to others; she isn't saying "here's how I do it" and she isn't representing a house style. ETA in a quick search I was unable to find anything about temporal adverbs in particular in the Chicago Manual of Style.