Adverbs Live On, As I Shall Explain

Kill your adverbs. Stephen King says it, your creative writing seminar instructor says it, and even that one guy from the meet-up critique group says it. Kill 'em dead. And they're right, though the critique group guy didn't have to harp on it so much. Adverbs are crutches for weak word selection. A power verb or a better adjective says more alone than any adverb can modify. 

So, kill 'em all. Right? Right.

Although…

Records show adverbs have been around since at least the Sumerians. That makes adverbs remarkably survivable. In fact, adverb-like things exist in every modern language. The adverb's importance led to a high water mark in 1974, when adverbs landed their own Schoolhouse Rock! segment.

It's helpful to remember there are all kinds of adverbs, and killing the good kinds takes out writing quality as collateral damage.

Merriam-Webster defines "adverb" as: 

A word used to modify a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a preposition, a phrase, a clause, or a sentence and often used to show degree, manner, place, or time.

A word. That's what has everyone on the warpath, the one-word kind. A word such as "often," which I could point out wasn't killed at Merriam-Webster's editorial committee. Often, such adverbs are extraneous. 

But there's also the unhyped adverbial clause. Oh, they're out there doing their thing, modifying verbs and such. Since we're defining things, "adverbial clause" is a group of words 1) containing a subject and verb and 2) functioning like a single-word adverb except it doesn't have to watch its back. An "adverbial phrase" is the sawed-off version without a subject and verb.

Here is an adverbial clause that clicks:

"They kicked me out of school because I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself at all." — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

To be obvious, "kicked" is the verb being modified, and "because" triggers the modifying clause with the why behind the kicking. I love the dead simplicity in construction and style. Simple isn't easy. "They kicked me out of school" is accurate as a sentence but incomplete. Connecting the why then and there gives the sentence an unfolding power. Great stories don't come down to somebody getting kicked. They come down to the "because."

Another one: 

"Richard Parker and I spent a week on the island, until the day I noticed millions of dead fish on the shore." — Yann Martel, Life of Pi

I dig this kind of switcheroo. One minute you're baited into island relaxation, and then comes the "until" twist. This sense of paradise lost works better as a single sentence entity than two chopped-up ideas.

Closer to our genre home:

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Sign of the Four" 

Holmes is explaining a process, an ongoing and difficult process, so the main clause ("whatever remains") sounds hollow without the deepening elements. "When" signals that depth of thought and opens the sentence up to its classic juxtaposition: impossible versus improbable, with improbable carrying the weight of truth.

And yet, a good yet, that sentence has an air of mystery, a craft trick that helps explain why adverbial clauses aren't marked for death. 

The adverbial clause has a near-identical twin, the adjectival clause. Those buggers play the same modifying role except they attach to nouns and pronouns. One could argue that the "when" in Holmes' quote above describes the elimination resulting in--modifying--the noun "whatever." It doesn't, by strict grammar. "When" indicates the time of the end action "remains." But that's the sort of thing strict grammarians fight about, not readers enjoying the richness of a layered sentence. 

Which is the point, to write something that people enjoy reading. So, kill those fluff adverbs. Don't tell the Lollys, but my last round of manuscript edits includes scrubbing for excess adverbs. Many don't survive. 

Still, let's not get lost in the blood-letting. Not all adverbs are one-word menaces. Some are complex ideas that imbue critical elements of conflict, time, and character. If you look closely, you might find those adverbs everywhere, hiding in plain sight, making writing worth reading.