It was popular some years ago, by those who had graduated from the Ernest Hemingway school of plain, direct, unadorened prose, to cross out any adjective, and especially any adverb, that wasn't absolutely essential to sense. Adverbs came in for particular disdain, as they were often tacked on to dialogue, leading either to awakwardly "telly" constructions ("I give up" she said, despairingly) or, worse yet, "Tom Swifties" ("I'll have a martini," said Tom, drily). Clearly, it's important to use adverbs very sparingly in dialogue, but what about elsewhere?
So have a look at novelist Robin Black's short essay "In Defense of Adverbs, Guardians of the Human Condition" She not only offers a strong brief in favor of their use, but gives quite specific examples of their effective use. One of these is Vladimir Nabokov, who -- writing in English as his second language -- deftly added strings of them. One of his tricks was to place them before the verb, so that the seeming manipulation or post-modification of the verb wasn't an issue. Nabokov was also liberal with adjectives. Have a look at the first paragraph of his novella Pnin:
The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin. Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flannelled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet.
And here we have no fewer than twenty adjectives, by my count, and five adverbs, all bundled into two sentences which describe Pnin so actutely that we're already fascinated, and a little embarrassed for the poor fellow. It's a masterful performance.
So consider these poor modifiers -- have you used them lately? Have you used them too much? Or, perhaps, trembling in fear as to what some know-it-all might say, used them too little? For this exercise, I'd like you to choose a paragraph from your current project -- one of good length and heft. Then, take out every adjective and adverb. After waiting at least a day, go back to this version of the paragraph and add as many adjectives and adverbs as you like, with this one rule: you can't use any of the ones you used before. Think about exactly what kinds of modifiers are needed, or whether they are needed, in every given instance. Every verb may have an adverb, and every noun may have an adjective -- there's nothing grammatically wrong with it, or even with having several. But which ones, and how many? Send all three paragraphs in a single document to me in an e-mail as usual, by the evening of Wednesday July 5th.
