

The Case Against Adverbs - user_235711
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/teachersatwork/the-case-against-adverbs/

======
scoofy
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.

~~~
adwf
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....

~~~
sghodas
The article directly addresses your exact point immediately after that
example:

"Readers can't be shown everything that happens to a character, or novels
would be 800 pages and cover 15 minutes in the protagonist's life. Sometimes
adverbs help to move the story along through summary or time compression. But
for young writers, learning to do without them is a good first practice."

~~~
adwf
Oops, thanks. Should probably pay closer attention!

Maybe this highlights the pitfalls of excessively long writing. Or more likely
the pitfalls of me commenting at 3am :(

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hackcasual
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
Also the locative adverb "up".

~~~
psychometry
No, the "up" in "caught up" is part of a phrasal verb. It's not an adverb.

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jimmaswell
""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
The author assumes there is a paragraph before that sentence that describes
his snobbish behavior.

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jerf
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
> 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.)

------
_delirium
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.

------
charlieflowers
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
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
'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
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.

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molbioguy
I dismissed this article quickly and summarily! Adverbs are important and
their loss in everyday speech (where I often notice it) is annoying.

~~~
lionsdan
They are also valuable for Tom Swifties.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swifty#Examples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swifty#Examples)

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kenko
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
The programmer mentality: any suggested guideline must immediately fit all
possible test cases or it is wrong.

~~~
kenko
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.

~~~
rmrfrmrf

        '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
Yes, 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.

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readymade
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.

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stevewilhelm
That was particularly informative. [1]

[1] youtube.com/watch?v=xECUrlnXCqk

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jmathes
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?

