The Adverb Thing

Yes, avoid using adverbs in your writing. But it’s more complicated than that…

Earlier this week I mentioned on Twitter that Hemingway was right, that we should distrust adjectives. This quickly shifted into the shared disdain many of us writers feel for adverbs, but the latter sentiment got some pushback. Why, some people mentioned, would we so loathe adverbs as to basically advise not using them, in effect taking away the tool of a writer?

As one might expect, some of this problem stems from the fact that Papa was more precise with his words than I was. No shame there…

So let’s unpack this. Hemingway said he was taught to “distrust” adjectives. His writing shows that he learned his lesson. The site LitCharts has some excellent data on this:

Hemingway used fewer adjectives and more verbs than most other writers, which is certainly one of the hallmarks of his pared down but still vivid style. But he doesn’t use zero adjectives, he “distrusts” them, which I take it mean that he thinks he needs a really good reason to use one. Therefore, some are in there, but fewer than in most writers’ canons. So, all good.

However, he uses more adverbs than the average. How can this be? Adverbs are the tools of the lazy writer, and Hemingway’s writing is not lazy. A deeper look at the data provides an answer. According to LitCharts, the adverbs Hemingway frequently uses are time, place, and frequency adverbs, but not manner adverbs. The latter are those pesky -ly words that clog up your writing. Regarding manner adverbs:

When we count up words that end in “ly,” we find that Hemingway actually uses manner adverbs much, much less than the average writer (42% as often).

This, to me, is the key to unlocking the broad advice I give to my students — which I stand by — that you should try to eliminate the adverbs in your work. What this means, and in my experience the way it’s commonly interpreted, is that we should eliminate manner adverbs from our work as they tend to be more of a crutch that prevents vivid writing rather than a facilitator of it. They tell the reader how something happened rather than show it.

Other kinds of adverbs are more innocuous, get less into “telling.”

Here’s an example of how manner adverbs act as a crutch:

He told her how important is was for her to come to the meeting, that her presence would affect the whole dynamic of the room.

“Ok,” she said dismissively.

Versus:

He told her how important is was for her to come to the meeting, that her presence would affect the whole dynamic of the room.

“Sure, Jim, I’ll bet it will. My just being in the room will change how they all see your presentation. Right.”

A few things here. One, while I intentionally made this example a little extreme, it illustrates how much richer the writing needs to be — in this case, the dialog — in order to put forward the idea of “dismissively.” In the second example, we see the dismissive nature of her her response, and thereore understand more about her and the way she dismisses him. This is why you don’t use adverbs, it forces you to give the reader more active, tactile details, which improves anyone’s writing.

Second, that avoiding adverbs forces one to do this extra work to enrich the writing makes doing so difficult. It’s easy to slap an adverb in your work, especially in a dialog tag, and harder to make your syntax and word choice precise enough to put forward the feeling an adverb tells a reader to have. But the effort is worth it. When readers experience an emotion based on the details in a story rather than being told to experience it, they are more connected with the writing.

So, yes, distrust adjectives. And kill your adverbs. Especially manner adverbs.

But, sometimes you’ll use them. If you look through my writing it’ll take you less than three minutes to find one.

Just make sure you really justify that use to yourself, make sure there’s no other way to say what you want to say. It’s difficult, but that effort is how you know you’re making your writing as good as it can be.