Josie’s Guide to Syntax: The Case for Adverbs (pt. 1)
Cover your lawn with dandelions!
I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s — GASP!! — too late.
Yes, yes, Stephen King. True, true.
Yet in stirring up his adverbial haterade, master literary mixologist Stephen King employs wryly three adverbs in his second sentence. Adverbs he uses cleverly for satire, and the satire makes his point — his logic rests upon undermining his own argument. He knows this. Like the cheetah lying still in wait until expediently striking its innocent prey, King waits 40 words before bludgeoning his reader with the syntactic tools of greatest surprise.
May we assume Stephen King brings to life adverbs intentionally in order to support his argument about adverbs? Yes. So if adverbs predicate King’s argument, what does that tell us about their power in our writing toolkit?
