Write Away

I quietly read this article on the Huffington Post today, and naturally thought I'd quickly post it for you all.


In Defense Of Adverbs
By Maddie Crum

Like like and other filler words, certain adverbs have saturated our speech and our writing, making once-meaningful phrases seem totally vapid. The idea that adverbs are just extraneous fluff has led to a smear campaign against them, and it's become common to suggest axing the part of speech altogether in order to make writing more powerful. This forceful call for more forceful writing is misguided; adverbs can be phonetically pleasing, can imbue sentences with subtlety, and should not be entirely shunned.
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Adverbs have a bad reputation among the creative writing elite. They are accused, often with reason, of weakening sentences and cheapening the meaning. In my writing, I tend to use them too often - but I used them a lot more often before my first (and only) creative writing course, where I learned that they are Totally Evil. That's not a slight exaggeration, either. My professor docked points for adverb use, unless it was deemed necessary as a last resort sort of thing. To be honest, adverbs don't bother me unless the sentence actually is stronger without them - which, to be fair, it often is. But I do feel that sometimes adverbs do give the verb a meaning appropriate to the story that either can't be portrayed without it, and alternative verbs either don't exist or don't sound natural. What do you think? Do you care about adverbs either way?