I love this. My publisher is anti-adverb, so I've had lots of them cut from my work. The guidance is that you can use them sparingly, but some editors reflexively cut them. And I want to say "No, but that was part of my small adverb budget...."
I read a book last month that was a great example of how not to use adverbs. They were sprinkled in to sound quirky and cute, almost never to convey meaning, and sometimes they were just completely wrong - “It took approximately three minutes and twenty-six seconds” drove me especially nuts. It’s not approximate if you’re giving me the precise time!!!!
...But that makes your point just as well, I think - it was sloppy, imprecise writing, poorly edited, by someone with no grasp of what function the adverbs were bringing to the sentence. The adverbs themselves were not the issue, they were just a particularly obvious showcase of the author’s general lack of skill with word choice. When they’re used badly, they stick out; when they’re used well, they stick out but it works.
This is a good point. The issue is not with adverbs but rather with their proper use--kind of like with everything else, actually!
And I agree with you about “approximately”: when we lived in NJ, our local NPR station would always say “today’s high will be approximately 74 degrees” when they meant that the high was predicted to be 74.
Great post, Mari. I agree with you (and Twain) about “very.” The brilliant Benjamin Dreyer, whose “Dreyer’s English” I think you would love, urges us to avoid what he calls “wan intensifiers.” 😹
Beyond that, fair dinkum about Hitchens. But while he may have been wrong about Iraq, but let’s not forget that he was on the right side of history for a long, long time before that, though not long enough, alas.
Please accept my assurance that - first impressions to the contrary - this is not intended to be patronising!
You came up with a spirited defense and some wonderful examples of the use of adverbs. I suspect that you were pushing at an open door with respect to Strunk and White's attitude. My interpretation of their comments is not that they were denigrating adverbs (it seems they explicitly said they valued them as indispensable), but saying "concentrate on getting the best verbs and nouns first" (presumably as adverbs and adjectives can only modify them so much).
As an English English-speaker the fact that English has replaced Latin as the World's lingua franca has advantages and disadvantages. We're not obliged to make any effort to learn a new language (an advantage but cause of much laziness etc.); but the price we pay is that English is spoken so much as a second language means that subtlety is lost, and the pace with which mistakes creep in and then are cemented is very uncomfortable. America being a land of immigrants makes it the home of the torture of the language.
Something I learned from your article is that some Americans do use adverbs, I hadn't noticed it before. (Ouch! See what I mean)? I thought they had gone completely - in the sense that adjectives are used as adverbs - together with whole tenses. E.g. "Did you put the rubbish out"? means that it is no longer possible (to the English) (the rubbish has now been collected. If the answer is "no" then Doh! you've missed it)! On the other hand "Have you put the rubbish out?" means that it is still possible.
Just in case I have any credibility left as a joyful human being, let me destroy it with the following two points. Well done for pointing out the way in which "hopefullly" is being used here. I'm afraid that it means it is not an adverb, despite ending in -ly. Neither is "very" as you seem to be implying.
Apologies again. Actually I enjoyed your piece, and learned a lot from it.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! You are correct that Strunk and White aren’t denigrating adverbs so much as advocating for using them sparingly (😉). I was being a bit unfair to them.
I have lived overseas and am fascinated by the extent to which English truly is the lingua franca now. As just one of many examples I could cite, I once attended an open rehearsal of a baroque chamber orchestra and chorus in Prague. The musicians came from Czechia, Croatia, and Austria, and they rehearsed in English. I have read that basic English is comparatively easy to learn, and one can achieve a kind of fluency (albeit with a limited vocabulary and simplified grammar) fairly quickly. I don’t agree that this tortures the language, though. I am in the camp of John McWhorter and other descriptive linguists, who celebrate the evolution of our wonderful language.
Finally, I have always been taught that “very” is indeed an adverb and adjective, because it modifies other adjectives. (https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/very) I would love to learn more about this word, in spite of my concurrence with Mark Twain!
I have absolutely no credentials or expertise in this area, so there's no need to assume I'm correct, but I would say that it CAN be an adverb - if it's modifying a verb rather than a nown.
E.g. She studied very diligently, and being very intelligent made rapid progress (or progressed rapidly).
Surely the first "very" is an adverb, and the second an adjective?
As regards torturing the language, I'm not in the camp of thinking that all change is bad. I love neologisms and especially new concepts as much as the next man, e.g. the original invention of the word "meme" - a very valuable concept. The newer meaning of a topical joke (picture & brief caption) I'm neutral about. But some new usages are detrimental. I think the acid test is whether it helps convey meaning effectively - the ultimate purpose of language. Some advances come with concomitant costs. For example I know a lady called Gay who wasn't necessarily overjoyed by the new (a while ago) meaning of that word.
But when whole patterns get destroyed, that is usually unhelpful. E.g. words ending in -is, like axis, diagnosis, came with a problem: how do you make them plural? And the answer has been you change it to -es: axes and diagnoses. This can be helpful: e.g. "bases, the plural of base is pronounced one way (with a schwa {sp?}), and basēs the plural of basis follows the above pattern. So when one hears the pronunciation of "processes" being butchered with a long e at the end, it's another little chip off the edifice of clarity... a very small one, to be sure.
I'm most grateful for, (and unsurprised by) your generous and cultured response: thanks very much.😊
I happen to be in Botswana for a while at the moment, and my gratitude that everyone here speaks English completely eclipses ANY reservations I have about the loss of nuance in the language. 🙂
These are wonderful examples! I agree that the most important issue with language change is whether the change improves or detracts from communication and clarity.
Enjoy Botswana! My only association with the country is through the novels of Alexander McCall Smith--which depict it as a wonderful place.
Almost forgot: I have a cute anecdote about “very”: In Czech, the word for “very” is “moc,” but it is a much more flexible word than our “very” and can be used as an intensifier in pretty much any situation. Sometimes people who weren’t fluent in English would translate “moc” literally, to amusing effect. I’ve seen signs advertising “Very Water” and “Very Goodies,” and a man once said to me, “very please!”
Thank you! Yes, nice examples of words not mapping completely onto those in another language.
I'm trying to imagine "moc" water. I could definitely do with some here! The humidity's about zero, and you have to really work at taking in enough water.
Aug 6, 2022·edited Aug 6, 2022Liked by Mari, the Happy Wanderer
My discovery of what it means to be a good writer came when, in the 80's, I accidentally discovered the newsletters of Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian. He wrote much about American education in general, but often used some poor functionary's bad writing to illustrate a point. The first essay here is a good example: https://sourcetext.com/grammarian-newslettersv10-html/
The epiphany was simple, good writers communicate their thoughts clearly. While bad writing is often the result of unclear and muddled thinking. Great writers, artists in their own right, can do so vividly, subtly... oh, the adverbs!
In college I took an excellent course which included phoenetics and the history of English. One of the first things we learned is that there are not 8 parts of speech in English, as is classically taught, but 13. (Allegedly Latin has 8 parts, and early grammarians just shoe-horned in English to fit.) The best example is adverbs, a word which describes a verb or another adverb or adjectives. But wait, why on earth would something which describes a verb also be used to describe non-verbs? Because we have only 8 parts to work with, and they have to go somewhere.
The key test is that any part of speech should be replaceable by any other word of the same part of speech, and still make grammatical sense.
The man ran quickly.
The blender ran quickly.
The blender ran very.
... wait, you can't substitue "very" for "quickly", so therefore they are not the same parts of speech. Note that substitutions need not make logical sense, but they must "sound" grammatically correct.
What's missing is words that are intensifiers, words with modify modifiers: very, somewhat, mostly, thickly, etc. I think the confusion is that many real adverbs can themselves also be intensifiers. But most common intensifiers cannot be adverbs.
Great eye/ear for this underrated part of speech! It's also a strange one. Not only do all the -ly verb modifiers qualify, but also a bunch of other modifiers like "however" and even your favorite, "very." Getting that one out of the way up front was a very, very, *very* good move ;) My favorite for condescending dismissal is "merely."
There exist many adverb-happy writers whose writings I have deeply enjoyed. There also exist many adverb-happy writers whose writings have made me want to reenact a Newtonian physics class with my head and a piece of drywall.
I agree that adverbs are tools and can be used for both ill and good, by both skilled and unskilled literary journeymen and women. Sometimes the results don't always end well, but having the freedom to embarrass oneself with one's own words is a fundamental right, and society would be worse off without it.
Having said that, the unfortunate tendency in evaluating writing these days is to decide whether one likes the writer's personal politics and beliefs first, and then make a judgment about their writing style afterwards. The trope of "I don't agree with this writer's opinion but I respect their writing ability" seems about as common as the Loch Ness Monster these days. I will admit that I'm not an exception to this, either, but I'm working on it with varying degrees of success.
Also, one last coda on Strunk and White: Rereading it, I wouldn't necessarily say it is a bad book per se, but it suffers from what I call the Education Cognition Theory, which is that any book assigned to a student as part of a compulsory school curriculum immediately becomes associated with the sadofascism of the public schooling industrial complex. Consequently, that student will never be able to see that book as anything other than a pile of the nasty gray stuff hornets make their nests out of.*
*Yes, I ended a sentence with a preposition. Please don't ban me.
Colloquial English spoken here! I end sentences with prepositions with wild abandon!
And I agree with you that it is very difficult to know whether a reviewer is responding to the intrinsic value and beauty of a book, or to spurious political issues.
It’s not just books, either. On a recent flight I watched the remake of West Side Story--the one that has been absolutely reamed out online because of a rape accusation against Ansel Elgort. I read so many attacks saying his performance was awful that I almost didn’t watch the film. Guess what? His dancing wasn’t great, but he has an absolutely stunning voice. Even more impressive, a number of his songs were, at his request, recorded live, and he did them beautifully. Unlike the online commenters trashing him for political reasons, I actually know something about singing, because I am a trained mezzo soprano.
I hope that the accusation against Elgort will be adjudicated in court, but his private behavior has no bearing on his musical ability.
An addition to your "what studying languages is like" list:
Polish: Hello, enjoy complex Latin grammar grafted onto Slavic vocabulary with plenty of "sh," "ch," and "zh" phonemes separated by scarce vowels. Have fun with declensions!
By the way, by my (completely anecdotal and unscientific) estimate, Polish writing tends to use a lot more adverbs than English does, and it doesn't come across as stilted or weak at all. On the contrary, adverbs in Polish make prose more vivid and interesting.
Interesting point about Polish! I used to speak pretty good Czech (motto: We have 65 unique verbs for “to go”!), and they did seem to stick “moc” (“very”) in all kinds of places where English wouldn’t. There is a vending machine at Prague’s airport labeled “Very Goodies,” and people have said “very please” to me.
Yes.... YES!!! As a hobby writer, I approve! I think "don't use adverbs" is bandied about by people who assume they're talking to bad writers- people who would use adverbs all the time, even when there was a better choice. But anyone with even a moment of experience can tell when it's better to use an adverb, and when its better to use a more specific verb, for tone, clarity, and flow. Every romance writer will tell you "whispered" is NOT the same as "said softly". Can you do one on the oxford comma next? LOL
Successful advocacy: I concur! (from Shari/not Mari)
Thanks, Mom!
I love this. My publisher is anti-adverb, so I've had lots of them cut from my work. The guidance is that you can use them sparingly, but some editors reflexively cut them. And I want to say "No, but that was part of my small adverb budget...."
Ha! I want an adverb budget too!
This was wildly fun to read. :D
I read a book last month that was a great example of how not to use adverbs. They were sprinkled in to sound quirky and cute, almost never to convey meaning, and sometimes they were just completely wrong - “It took approximately three minutes and twenty-six seconds” drove me especially nuts. It’s not approximate if you’re giving me the precise time!!!!
...But that makes your point just as well, I think - it was sloppy, imprecise writing, poorly edited, by someone with no grasp of what function the adverbs were bringing to the sentence. The adverbs themselves were not the issue, they were just a particularly obvious showcase of the author’s general lack of skill with word choice. When they’re used badly, they stick out; when they’re used well, they stick out but it works.
This is a good point. The issue is not with adverbs but rather with their proper use--kind of like with everything else, actually!
And I agree with you about “approximately”: when we lived in NJ, our local NPR station would always say “today’s high will be approximately 74 degrees” when they meant that the high was predicted to be 74.
"Every morning, while she was sleeping, I'd cross out half her adjectives. Hercules himself, could not have done it."
I love this quote! What is it from?
Impromptu (1991). A great little film mostly centering around a gathering of artists and intellectuals at a house in the French countryside in 1836.
The quote is Alfred De Musset (Mandy Patinkin) commenting on the work of his former lover George Sand (Judy Davis).
I love this movie and my daughter is partially named after George Sand.
Thanks! I saw the movie many years ago, and have obviously forgotten all about it (except for Hugh Grant’s neurasthenic Chopin, that is!).
Now I have to see it, being a Chopin fan.
So there is at least -- and possibly at most -- one disadvantage to not being a morning person 
Great post, Mari. I agree with you (and Twain) about “very.” The brilliant Benjamin Dreyer, whose “Dreyer’s English” I think you would love, urges us to avoid what he calls “wan intensifiers.” 😹
Beyond that, fair dinkum about Hitchens. But while he may have been wrong about Iraq, but let’s not forget that he was on the right side of history for a long, long time before that, though not long enough, alas.
Oh, I greatly admire Hitchens and miss him. His brilliance and humor were so much fun! And thanks for sharing “wan intensifiers”--what an apt term!
Please accept my assurance that - first impressions to the contrary - this is not intended to be patronising!
You came up with a spirited defense and some wonderful examples of the use of adverbs. I suspect that you were pushing at an open door with respect to Strunk and White's attitude. My interpretation of their comments is not that they were denigrating adverbs (it seems they explicitly said they valued them as indispensable), but saying "concentrate on getting the best verbs and nouns first" (presumably as adverbs and adjectives can only modify them so much).
As an English English-speaker the fact that English has replaced Latin as the World's lingua franca has advantages and disadvantages. We're not obliged to make any effort to learn a new language (an advantage but cause of much laziness etc.); but the price we pay is that English is spoken so much as a second language means that subtlety is lost, and the pace with which mistakes creep in and then are cemented is very uncomfortable. America being a land of immigrants makes it the home of the torture of the language.
Something I learned from your article is that some Americans do use adverbs, I hadn't noticed it before. (Ouch! See what I mean)? I thought they had gone completely - in the sense that adjectives are used as adverbs - together with whole tenses. E.g. "Did you put the rubbish out"? means that it is no longer possible (to the English) (the rubbish has now been collected. If the answer is "no" then Doh! you've missed it)! On the other hand "Have you put the rubbish out?" means that it is still possible.
Just in case I have any credibility left as a joyful human being, let me destroy it with the following two points. Well done for pointing out the way in which "hopefullly" is being used here. I'm afraid that it means it is not an adverb, despite ending in -ly. Neither is "very" as you seem to be implying.
Apologies again. Actually I enjoyed your piece, and learned a lot from it.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! You are correct that Strunk and White aren’t denigrating adverbs so much as advocating for using them sparingly (😉). I was being a bit unfair to them.
I have lived overseas and am fascinated by the extent to which English truly is the lingua franca now. As just one of many examples I could cite, I once attended an open rehearsal of a baroque chamber orchestra and chorus in Prague. The musicians came from Czechia, Croatia, and Austria, and they rehearsed in English. I have read that basic English is comparatively easy to learn, and one can achieve a kind of fluency (albeit with a limited vocabulary and simplified grammar) fairly quickly. I don’t agree that this tortures the language, though. I am in the camp of John McWhorter and other descriptive linguists, who celebrate the evolution of our wonderful language.
Finally, I have always been taught that “very” is indeed an adverb and adjective, because it modifies other adjectives. (https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/very) I would love to learn more about this word, in spite of my concurrence with Mark Twain!
I have absolutely no credentials or expertise in this area, so there's no need to assume I'm correct, but I would say that it CAN be an adverb - if it's modifying a verb rather than a nown.
E.g. She studied very diligently, and being very intelligent made rapid progress (or progressed rapidly).
Surely the first "very" is an adverb, and the second an adjective?
As regards torturing the language, I'm not in the camp of thinking that all change is bad. I love neologisms and especially new concepts as much as the next man, e.g. the original invention of the word "meme" - a very valuable concept. The newer meaning of a topical joke (picture & brief caption) I'm neutral about. But some new usages are detrimental. I think the acid test is whether it helps convey meaning effectively - the ultimate purpose of language. Some advances come with concomitant costs. For example I know a lady called Gay who wasn't necessarily overjoyed by the new (a while ago) meaning of that word.
But when whole patterns get destroyed, that is usually unhelpful. E.g. words ending in -is, like axis, diagnosis, came with a problem: how do you make them plural? And the answer has been you change it to -es: axes and diagnoses. This can be helpful: e.g. "bases, the plural of base is pronounced one way (with a schwa {sp?}), and basēs the plural of basis follows the above pattern. So when one hears the pronunciation of "processes" being butchered with a long e at the end, it's another little chip off the edifice of clarity... a very small one, to be sure.
I'm most grateful for, (and unsurprised by) your generous and cultured response: thanks very much.😊
I happen to be in Botswana for a while at the moment, and my gratitude that everyone here speaks English completely eclipses ANY reservations I have about the loss of nuance in the language. 🙂
These are wonderful examples! I agree that the most important issue with language change is whether the change improves or detracts from communication and clarity.
Enjoy Botswana! My only association with the country is through the novels of Alexander McCall Smith--which depict it as a wonderful place.
Almost forgot: I have a cute anecdote about “very”: In Czech, the word for “very” is “moc,” but it is a much more flexible word than our “very” and can be used as an intensifier in pretty much any situation. Sometimes people who weren’t fluent in English would translate “moc” literally, to amusing effect. I’ve seen signs advertising “Very Water” and “Very Goodies,” and a man once said to me, “very please!”
Thank you! Yes, nice examples of words not mapping completely onto those in another language.
I'm trying to imagine "moc" water. I could definitely do with some here! The humidity's about zero, and you have to really work at taking in enough water.
There even are places where English completely disappears
[Aside] in America They haven’t spoken it for years. 
Loved this. It’s the difference between 2D & 3D is how I predictably imagine it 😊
Nice analogy!
My discovery of what it means to be a good writer came when, in the 80's, I accidentally discovered the newsletters of Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian. He wrote much about American education in general, but often used some poor functionary's bad writing to illustrate a point. The first essay here is a good example: https://sourcetext.com/grammarian-newslettersv10-html/
The epiphany was simple, good writers communicate their thoughts clearly. While bad writing is often the result of unclear and muddled thinking. Great writers, artists in their own right, can do so vividly, subtly... oh, the adverbs!
P.S. I think you are a great writer, Mari.
Thanks for the link, and thank you even more for the compliment!
In college I took an excellent course which included phoenetics and the history of English. One of the first things we learned is that there are not 8 parts of speech in English, as is classically taught, but 13. (Allegedly Latin has 8 parts, and early grammarians just shoe-horned in English to fit.) The best example is adverbs, a word which describes a verb or another adverb or adjectives. But wait, why on earth would something which describes a verb also be used to describe non-verbs? Because we have only 8 parts to work with, and they have to go somewhere.
The key test is that any part of speech should be replaceable by any other word of the same part of speech, and still make grammatical sense.
The man ran quickly.
The blender ran quickly.
The blender ran very.
... wait, you can't substitue "very" for "quickly", so therefore they are not the same parts of speech. Note that substitutions need not make logical sense, but they must "sound" grammatically correct.
What's missing is words that are intensifiers, words with modify modifiers: very, somewhat, mostly, thickly, etc. I think the confusion is that many real adverbs can themselves also be intensifiers. But most common intensifiers cannot be adverbs.
Whoa! I didn’t know any of this, in spite of being an editor and former English teacher! Thank you for the interesting info!
Great eye/ear for this underrated part of speech! It's also a strange one. Not only do all the -ly verb modifiers qualify, but also a bunch of other modifiers like "however" and even your favorite, "very." Getting that one out of the way up front was a very, very, *very* good move ;) My favorite for condescending dismissal is "merely."
There exist many adverb-happy writers whose writings I have deeply enjoyed. There also exist many adverb-happy writers whose writings have made me want to reenact a Newtonian physics class with my head and a piece of drywall.
I agree that adverbs are tools and can be used for both ill and good, by both skilled and unskilled literary journeymen and women. Sometimes the results don't always end well, but having the freedom to embarrass oneself with one's own words is a fundamental right, and society would be worse off without it.
Having said that, the unfortunate tendency in evaluating writing these days is to decide whether one likes the writer's personal politics and beliefs first, and then make a judgment about their writing style afterwards. The trope of "I don't agree with this writer's opinion but I respect their writing ability" seems about as common as the Loch Ness Monster these days. I will admit that I'm not an exception to this, either, but I'm working on it with varying degrees of success.
Also, one last coda on Strunk and White: Rereading it, I wouldn't necessarily say it is a bad book per se, but it suffers from what I call the Education Cognition Theory, which is that any book assigned to a student as part of a compulsory school curriculum immediately becomes associated with the sadofascism of the public schooling industrial complex. Consequently, that student will never be able to see that book as anything other than a pile of the nasty gray stuff hornets make their nests out of.*
*Yes, I ended a sentence with a preposition. Please don't ban me.
Colloquial English spoken here! I end sentences with prepositions with wild abandon!
And I agree with you that it is very difficult to know whether a reviewer is responding to the intrinsic value and beauty of a book, or to spurious political issues.
It’s not just books, either. On a recent flight I watched the remake of West Side Story--the one that has been absolutely reamed out online because of a rape accusation against Ansel Elgort. I read so many attacks saying his performance was awful that I almost didn’t watch the film. Guess what? His dancing wasn’t great, but he has an absolutely stunning voice. Even more impressive, a number of his songs were, at his request, recorded live, and he did them beautifully. Unlike the online commenters trashing him for political reasons, I actually know something about singing, because I am a trained mezzo soprano.
I hope that the accusation against Elgort will be adjudicated in court, but his private behavior has no bearing on his musical ability.
I do think I use too many adverbs and adjectives, and I excise a lot of ‘em. The examples you provided were delightful !
Glad you enjoyed them!
An addition to your "what studying languages is like" list:
Polish: Hello, enjoy complex Latin grammar grafted onto Slavic vocabulary with plenty of "sh," "ch," and "zh" phonemes separated by scarce vowels. Have fun with declensions!
By the way, by my (completely anecdotal and unscientific) estimate, Polish writing tends to use a lot more adverbs than English does, and it doesn't come across as stilted or weak at all. On the contrary, adverbs in Polish make prose more vivid and interesting.
Interesting point about Polish! I used to speak pretty good Czech (motto: We have 65 unique verbs for “to go”!), and they did seem to stick “moc” (“very”) in all kinds of places where English wouldn’t. There is a vending machine at Prague’s airport labeled “Very Goodies,” and people have said “very please” to me.
Semi-confidently, I half-heartedly plan to occasionally, but earnestly, employ your expertly written adverb ideas.
Ha! Fun comment!
Yes.... YES!!! As a hobby writer, I approve! I think "don't use adverbs" is bandied about by people who assume they're talking to bad writers- people who would use adverbs all the time, even when there was a better choice. But anyone with even a moment of experience can tell when it's better to use an adverb, and when its better to use a more specific verb, for tone, clarity, and flow. Every romance writer will tell you "whispered" is NOT the same as "said softly". Can you do one on the oxford comma next? LOL
Excellent points! And as a proud member of Team Oxford Comma, I may just write a post in its defense one day!
Do you know who is a fan of the adverb, Martin Amis. Though I’m not sure he wrote about it 
Tidbit 3: brilliant!!! I enjoyed this Wanderer article immensely.
I thank you heartily!