AGAINST ADVERBS
On Saturday night I appeared, along with Megan Nolan, Nico Walker, Noah Kumin, George Olesky, plus various dramatic, dance, and musical performers, at the “Rear End” installment of Beckett Rossett’s Tense Reading Series, probably the last installment to be held at his space at 432 Hudson Street in the West Village (a book sale there is ongoing if you’re in the neighborhood). Below is the essay I read, which was published in the May 16, 2016 issue of New York Magazine under the title “Can We Just Lose the Adverb (Already)?”.
I’m cursed with a mind that looks at a sentence and sees grammar before it sees meaning. It might be that I’m doing math by other means, that I overdid it with diagramming sentences as a boy, or that my grasp of English was warped by learning Latin. Translating Horace felt like solving math problems. Reading Emily Dickinson began to feel like solving math problems. You might think this is a cold way of reading, but it’s the opposite. You develop feelings. Pronoun, verb, noun — I like sentences that proceed in that way, in a forward march. Or those tricked out with a preposition, another noun, and a couple of adjectives. Conjunctions and articles leave me unfazed. If these combinations result in elaborate syntactical tangles, it thrills me. It’s cheap words I hate, and I hate adverbs.
I’m unembarrassed to admit that my taste in literary style owes a lot to my adolescent reading of The Sun Also Rises — Hemingway was no friend of adverbs. He’s not alone. “Use as few adverbs as possible” is among V. S. Naipaul’s rules for beginning writers. When William Strunk and E. B. White admonish us to omit unnecessary words, I know they’re talking about adverbs without their having to say it.
What’s my objection? I am a recovering copy editor and proofreader, and I enjoy a good plunge into the usage wars. I think New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris’s best seller of last year, Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, is a terrific book, but she doesn’t much concern herself with adverbs as a category. Most copy editors conceive of themselves as something between traffic cops and U.N. peacekeepers, and adverbs are not illegal. They are not war crimes. Which is just as well, because I don’t think immersion in either rules or theory can do much for style, and the question of adverbs is, in the end, a question of style. And in terms of style, rules are not that important; with all due respect to Norris, four years of working as an editor in England broke me of the belief that the codes of comma placement were anything but arbitrary. Whether you venerate or violate prescriptions, it’s diction that really matters, diction and word order. We are first of all slaves to our eyes and our ears, not to that wondrous document The Chicago Manual of Style.