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 ...

When I first learned that fans of Taylor Swift called themselves Swifties, I smiled. I knew the word Swiftie in a completely different context. The source of my knowledge is not a glamorous global ...

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, ...

“Many older adults said they feel positively about their lives,” the New York Times reported recently. That sentence probably sounds as acceptable to you as it did to the Times editors. But what if ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

The beef had been aged dry for 30 days, and it changed my life. Not the way you’re thinking. I didn’t eat the life-changing meat. I just read about it in an article I was editing — and my relationship ...

I still remember the awful woman I met at a reception during an English Speaking Union meeting on George Street, Edinburgh, in 2008 (I I still remember the awful woman I met at a reception during an ...