Adjectives and (uh oh) Adverbs

Moving on to the next chapter in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, from which I’m doing all the exercises as a series here, we come to one of the trickier and more controversial questions: adjectives and (eek!) adverbs.

Le Guin starts by explaining her basic position clearly:

Adjectives and adverbs are rich and good and fattening. The main thing is not to overindulge. (STC 61)

From here she goes on to a brief sketch of some basic principles and some dangers, immediately followed by a rather obvious exercise she invented when she was 15 (we’ll do it next time). So what are the principles and dangers?

The core principle, of course, is that if you can embed the meaning of an adverb into a verb, or an adjective into a noun, then you get stronger prose. So “he dashed” is stronger than “he ran fast,” and “tome” is stronger than “big book.” And then there’s the danger represented by empty words and weasel words: very, somehow, really, quite, just, sort of, suddenly, and so on. (Beautiful exception that proves the rule: John Crowley’s Little, Big uses the word “Somehow” fairly often, always with the capital letter, and it’s extremely powerful—not least because that word doesn’t mean anything specific.)

Having told us what to watch out for, Le Guin seems about to stop short, and then we get one last remark:

I would recommend to all storytellers a watchful attitude and a thoughtful, careful choice of adjectives and adverbs, because the bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief, and narrative prose, particularly if it’s going a long distance, needs more muscle than fat. (STC 61)

Now for once I have a real objection to what Le Guin is doing here; even more remarkably, my objection is to how she says it. Usually I love her writing, at all levels, but not here. Why? Because Le Guin surely knows well that for almost as long as people have been trying to undermine decent English prose by insisting on short sentences, so to have much the same people been insisting that all adverbs are bad and adjectives should be avoided whenever possible. (Actually, it’s not all adverbs they hate, just the -ly ones that Tom Lehrer wrote about for “Electric Company”; they don’t seem to mind again, almost, back, even, far, instead, near, otherwise, rather, seldom, so, still, then, therefore….) And I think Le Guin should have taken these people on, rather than leaving this chapter looking (if you’re a little thick) like it supports their position.

Adverbs are just fine, as are adjectives, but they’re dangerous. Not, in my opinion, because they’re fattening, leaving rich, heavy, purple prose. That can happen, of course, but it’s easy enough to slap down. No, the problem is that they’re so often lazy. Why struggle to find a strong verb when you can use a weak one and tack on an adverb?

The question, when you use any of these words, is why. Consider the following:

very tall guy — gigantic man — statuesque male — giant — colossus

he went fast — he ran quickly — he dashed — he skedaddled — he sprinted — he careered wildly

I think we can agree that, outside of dialogue, there’s not much use in the first of each list: “The very tall guy went fast” stinks. But then what? In most cases, “statuesque male” is going to sound affected, and “he skedaddled” highly informal, such that “the statuesque male skedaddled” sounds like a parody of a bad writer. But there is no doubt in my mind that P.G. Wodehouse could have made use of “statuesque male,” and I’m pretty sure he actually did describe Roderick Spode as a “colossus,” albeit that’s Bertie Wooster speaking. (Spode, if you recall, is the fascist would-be dictator who leads the Black Shorts and is deeply attached to Madeline Bassett, the drippy “gawd-‘elp-us.”) My point being, it’s not a question of whether to use these words and phrases, but when, which means why.

When Bertie refers to Spode as a colossus, Wodehouse is playing on the word’s overwrought character: it’s hard these days to describe someone as a “world-striding colossus” and sound like you mean it. If I describe a character as a “giant,” context is everything: setting aside a fantasy world in which we might actually mean Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, the word-choice will attract attention from the reader, whether they’re aware of it or not, in the same way as “he dashed” attracts more attention than “he ran.”

If I’ve decided to attract that kind of attention, I need to decide between strong options: should my giant dash or sprint? (Actually, neither: in my mind’s eye, giants can run and lumber and so forth, and they may be able to do it very quickly, but they don’t dash or sprint.) And while I’m at it, what if I want even a little more—more detail, more emphasis, more oomph—and go for “careered wildly”? There’s the dreaded -ly adverb, but is it bad?

I’d say it’s not bad, not at all. The reason is that you’ve already incorporated the adverb into the verb—careered instead of ran—but then you went on to describe, and grammatically speaking that description is adverbial. In fact, if I wrote that George “dashed down the street, his booted feet striking a sharp tattoo on the pavement,” everything after “dashed” is adverbial: it is applied to the verb, Latin ad-verbum (verbum, -i, n. means “word,” but that’s irrelevant here). My point is that if you genuinely think all adverbs and most adjectives are markers of bad writing, it would appear that what you in fact object to is description—in which case I have to wonder why you’re trying to write at all.

I realize that Le Guin didn’t say “don’t use adverbs,” but if you’re one of these adverb Nazis you could convince yourself that this is what she really means. Excuse me: means.

Thanks for reading!