There Are No Rules - The Much Maligned Adverb

Today's guest post is by Jim Adam, who wrote a wonderful 3-part series on protagonists & goals. Read the part 3 here (which includes links to parts 1 & 2). Visit Jim at his site or follow him on Twitter.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Laureate, went on record several years ago saying that he no longer uses adverbs. If he encounters one in his writing, he removes it. And he's not alone. A lot of writers, editors, agents, publishers, and academics these days seem to have joined the crowd, insisting that adverbs should be avoided altogether.

Do some of these folks remove adverbs from their dialogue too? Not from dialogue tags, but from the dialogue itself? I'm guessing some of them do. Oops!

Sure, adverbs can be overused. But if one extreme is bad, the opposite extreme is just as bad. Balance in all things. Extremism comes in many forms, and it flows just as easily from a word processor as from an Uzi submachine gun.

Doing something the same way every time doesn't require a great artist. It doesn't require a brain. It doesn't even require something as sophisticated as a computer. A mechanism of gears and springs, a clockwork automaton, a machine in the 1800s sense of the word: that's all it takes to do something the same way every time.

Consider the title of this article. I could easily have entitled this piece, "The Maligned Adverb," and the result would have been little different. However, "The Much Maligned Adverb" works. There is nothing inherently offensive or distracting about it. And the point of this article isn't that adverbs have been criticized, because some of the criticism is warranted. Rather, the point is that adverbs have been overly criticized.

A title like "The Overly Maligned Adverb" would be weaker, in my way of thinking, because it loses the alliteration of "much maligned." In any case, calling this article "The Adverb" (avoiding any sort of modifier at all), "The Maligned Adverb," "The Much Maligned Adverb," or "The Overly Maligned Adverb," should be a result of the writer actively deciding which title suits them and their subject the best, not the result of a mindless bigotry toward modifiers in general, and adverbs in particular.

Adverbs can, in fact, make for more compact writing. Consider:

"With a reluctant grin" vs. "Grinning reluctantly"

In the Strunk and White sense, the adverbial version is tighter and, therefore, better. It uses two words compared to the adjectival version's four, a saving of 50%.

Naturally, a fanatic would claim that the previous example is meaningless since both reluctant and reluctantly should be cut.

But consider a sentence slipped in earlier: "It flows just as easily from a word processor as from an Uzi." Would a Nobel Prize winner spend time rewriting that sentence so as to eliminate the need for "easily"? Apparently he would. Feel free to give it a go yourself. Personally, I find such endeavors to be not only pointless, but downright silly.

Adverbs are like the writer's version of vibrato. Once upon a time, a guest conductor at a philharmonic orchestra asked the lead violin player for a tuning tone, got back a note with vibrato on it, and had to be carted out of the practice hall in a straitjacket. Even then, I'm not sure the violin player understood her mistake. Most likely, she wasn't even consciously aware of using vibrato.

When overused, any technique becomes a tick, a mannerism. It ceases to be a skill wielded artistically, like adding icing to a cake, and instead becomes a cake buried in a blob of icing. This is true of vibrato in music as well as Tom Swifties and other adverbial abuses in writing. But this doesn't mean that either vibrato or adverbs should be discarded altogether.

In religion, people do pointless, silly things and then claim that makes them more moral. In writing, people do pointless, silly things and claim they're better writers for it:

Don't end a sentence in a preposition.
Don't split your infinitives.
Don't use adverbs.

These are the sorts of rules that people embrace not because the rules make sense, but because the rules are absolute. Absolutist rules eliminate that insecurity we feel when we rely on our conscience (in the realm of morality) or our discernment (in the realm of art). Though absolute rules sometimes cause us to behave like we have obsessive-compulsive disorder (or worse), we continue to embrace them, and the world is a less happy place because of it.

Sure, writers need to keep an eye on their adjectives and adverbs, to not let them get out of hand. Overuse of modifiers is every bit as bad as cutting modifiers out altogether. And vice versa. The sweet spot is somewhere between those two extremes, and where you find your personal sweet spot helps distinguish you as a unique writer.

Let all right-thinking people take a stand now against fanaticism of all kinds, including the current bigotry toward the humble adverb.

Craft & Technique | Guest Post

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 1:22:24 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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