Theme
7:54am September 25, 2014
slaybastian asked: also people who say that adverbs are the worst thing ever, especially when describing speech, should probably stop. 'he says quietly' has different connotations to 'he whispers'. i distinctly remember being marked down from an a to a b because i wouldn't remove my adverbs, because i found that if i put in longer, more 'intelligent' words, i would lose the reader and the flow of the work would be interrupted. it's fine if you're going for pretentious, but otherwise, no. stop.

Yes, that.  Adverbs can be good or bad it all depends on how you use them.  Like most words, really.  And honestly, I think any formulaic rule about how to tell “good writing” from “bad writing” is going to end up pretentious and useless for actually creating good writing.  It’s just an easy way for people to think they’re cleverer than other people.

I do have actual problems with my writing, and I work really hard on fixing them, but none of them are so simple as adverbs or ‘said’, and few real problems are that simple.  I wish they were.  Then we could all be great writers.

Also writing depends on your audience.  The way I write naturally is really good for one particular kind of reader, the problem is that’s not the most common kind of reader, and I’m not writing exclusively for that type of reader, so I have to be careful and rein in some of my tendencies to be overly detailed, repetitive, and long-winded.  There are readers for which that would be perfect writing, but most readers aren’t.  And I’m actually not the kind of reader who could easily read my own writing half the time.  So… yeah, that says it all.