… but our independent journalism isn’t free to produce. Help us keep it this way with a tax-deductible donation today. Marlon James, the Jamaican-born Macalester College English professor who last ...

Adverbs are great, right? They let you describe how an action went down — whether it was walking quickly or sleeping soundly or yelling loudly. But if adverbs are so great, why do editors like me ...

Mastering adjectives and adverbs is crucial for vivid and engaging writing. Many students struggle with this concept, leading to awkward prose and undermining their credibility. Adjectives describe ...

So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to avoid adverbs and adjectives (Zinsser 2006). Adjectives and adverbs sprinkle paper with unnecessary ...

Aspiring science-fiction authors receive one piece of advice above all others: Forsake the adverb, the killer of prose. It’s terribly, awfully, horrendously important. But why? Really, adverbs aren’t ...

Adjectives should be rationed and adverbs questioned. When the Covid-19 was raging through the world, there was a poster: Is your journey really necessary? Let’s replace the word “journey” with ...

Consider two sentences, one with an adverb and the other an active verb: “He closed the door firmly.” “He slammed the door.” If you’re Stephen King, you like the second and hate the first. Because ...

Is there something unforgivably, infuriatingly obfuscatory about the unrestrained use of adjectives and adverbs? Many celebrated stylists think so. Crime writer Elmore Leonard, who died last week, ...

I am gladly, fully, openly in support of adverbs. Despite our democratic ideals, schoolchildren throughout America learn that not all words are created equal: Nouns and verbs make sense of the world, ...

No part of speech has had to put up with so much adversity as the adverb. The grammatical equivalent of cheap cologne or trans fat, the adverb is supposed to be used sparingly, if at all, to modify ...