The Most Valuable Writing Lesson I Ever Learned Was in Fifth Grade
How a classroom game became a go-to editing strategy I still use today
The game was called “Adverbs” and it I remember it as a class favorite, right up there with 7-Up, I Spy and Black Magic.
Like the other games in the late afternoon rotation in Mrs. Lake’s fifth grade classroom, Adverbs required a volunteer. When it was time to play, hands shot toward the industrial ceiling tiles. Everyone wanted to be selected to go to the front of the room and have Mrs. Lake whisper an adverb into their ear. It wasn’t just for the social currency, either. Adverbs was an action game — an opportunity to get up from your desk and do something active.
That was the irony of Adverbs, the game. It was also the point.
Under the guise of classroom entertainment, Mrs. Lake was reinforcing a writing rule I think about every time I sit in front of my keyboard: replace adverbs with strong verbs.
Adverbs: the game
It worked like this: After being given an adverb like “excitedly” or “quietly,” the selected student had go to outside the classroom door and re-enter the room walking in the manner the adverb suggested.
A student walking excitedly, for instance, might bound through the door, pumping both fists overhead. A volunteer entering the room quietly might tread in on tiptoes. Those of us sitting in the audience would guess what adverb the volunteer had been given based on what we were seeing — and what we saw was, invariably, action. Our efforts to describe the action led to better, stronger ways to communicate what was happening in the room.
Mrs. Lake never belabored the point. There was no writing on the blackboard, no talk of sentence structure, certainly no diagraming. No, Mrs. Lake pulled the ultimate show, don’t tell on this one. I, however, am no Mrs. Lake.
Adverbs: the home version
I play an at-home version of Adverbs whenever I’m at the editing phase with a piece of my writing. I go through the text scanning for adverbs, and, when I find one, I visualize a nameless, faceless student coming in the room in the manner the adverb would suggest. I highly recommend this an editing exercise, because it results in limp adverbs being replaced with descriptive action words: verbs!
Take a look at the examples from the classroom scene above. Instead of saying, “the student walked excitedly into the room,” we could swap that lazy adverb with the strong verbs “bounded” and “pumping” to get: “the student bounded into the room, pumping his fists in the air.” That’s a lot more visual and active, isn’t it?
For those concerned with the economy of words, the second example with the student walking quietly into the room could punched up with a word-for-word swap that would have the student tiptoeing into the room.
The take away
Adverbs are weak. Verbs are strong. Strong verbs make for strong writing. If you are tempted to use an adverb, try to visualize someone coming into your office in a manner suggested by your adverb word choice. Make note of what you are seeing in your mind’s eye. Put it into words. And…bingo! You just scored a huge editing
