Comments on: Addicted to Adverbs

By: Sharron Gunn

Sharron Gunn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:19:22 +0000

Sometimes the rule books make your writing too much like everyone else’s. I guess I’ll go by the rules for much of the propose, but
use language as it is spoken for dialogue and interior monologue.

In search of Voice,

Sharron

By: Ros

Ros — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:30:22 +0000

Ah, but how I love adverbs, lovely, lovely things that they are. I, too, overuse them, and then judiciously cull them, leaving my work somehow…flat. Sometimes we can get carried away with all those ‘rules’ and go too far the other way. The challenge is finding that happy medium. The wonderful E.C. Sheedy once suggested to me to try writing my first draft without (gasp! choke!) any adverbs, and then go back and add what I think it needed.

I’ll have to check out Marisa’s book. Thanks, Jodie!

By: Rachel

Rachel — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:26:14 +0000

I definitely, absolutely, completely abhor adverbs in my writing .

Seriously though – oops…

I had a fabulous book called Steering the Craft by the brilliant Ursula Le Guin, chock full of writing exercises. I often use the one that suggests writing a page or so of narrative with no adjectives or adverbs – my journalism students hate it because they can’t manage a sentence without them.
In fact, one student *began* the exercise with an adjective! It’s a great way to make people aware of how often they use these words and how careful we must be to make sure we use them only to make the story stronger.