In his splendidly (oops…) entertaining and highly (ouch!) edifying writing primer On Writing–A Memoir of the Craft, horrormeister Stephen King counsels against the use of adverbs:
Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is a the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish moustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.
The above 80-word paragraph features five adverbs, i.e., 6.25% of it is pure adverbiage—quite remarkable for a paragraph explicitly composed to discourage rather than to promote their employment—including a whopping three instances of the word usually. (On the previous page, Mr. King had stated that he was “not in love” with the sentence My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss because it contained the word with twice in four words.)
Mr. King continues:
Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there.
Good point. While I’m at it, I shall also ask myself if really really has to be there.
A Tenth Anniversary Edition of On Writing is scheduled for July 2010. Whether the author or his editor will excise a few adverbs from the anti-adverb section remains to be seen.
What also caught my attention—other than the substantive content itself—was that in its 290 pages, On Writing contained at least twenty instances of the word apt in the sense of likely, as in you’re not apt to get a very unbiased opinion from folks who’ve eaten dinner at your house on page 217. (Incidentally, does very really have to be there?)
The last time I found the frequency of a particular not-so-common word similarly conspicuous was when I read The Da Vinci Code. In one of its early chapters, someone snaked himself through a partition at the Louvre. A few dozen pages later, a van snaked its way up a hill. For the rest of the novel, at clockwork intervals, someone or something advanced by snaking. About halfway through the tale I began to suspect that the repeated use of the word snake was yet another clue to the solution of the mystery. Thus I resolved that an serpent of some sort must have swallowed the Holy Grail; or perhaps that the Holy Grail was indeed Mary Magdalene’s offspring, and snake was used as a phallic motif that, yes, snaked itself through the whole novel. (Given the wealth of verbs that signify locomotion, it is hard to imagine that all this snaking could have been a mere editorial oversight.)
In addition, there was a lot of wheeling going on in the Da Vinci Code. No one ever seemed to turn around. Everybody wheeled.
As Stephen King would put it, characters and objects in Mr. Brown’s novel were usually more apt to snake and wheel than they were usually apt to move and turn.
Usually, that is.
