Every writing workshop I have ever attended has, at some point, produced a version of the same sentence: “cut your adverbs.” It is delivered with the confidence of settled law, usually accompanied by a citation of Stephen King’s line about the road to hell being paved with them. Nobody in the room ever asks what, exactly, we lose when we comply.

A Convenient Scapegoat

The case against the adverb is really a case against a specific kind of lazy adverb — the “she said angrily” that should have been rendered in better dialogue or a sharper verb. This is a fair complaint about weak writing. It has been generalized, somewhere in the last thirty years of workshop culture, into a blanket indictment of an entire part of speech, which is a much stranger claim and one that doesn’t survive contact with the writers we supposedly admire.

What Precision Actually Requires

Nabokov modifies constantly and precisely. Woolf’s adverbs are load-bearing; remove them from Mrs. Dalloway and you don’t get a leaner sentence, you get a different, flatter claim about how a character moved through a room. The rule was never really about adverbs. It was about vagueness, and adverbs got blamed because they’re the easiest part of speech to spot in a draft, which made them a convenient scapegoat for a harder problem.

The rule was never really about adverbs. It was about vagueness.

What we’ve actually done, in enforcing this rule so literally, is train a generation of writers to distrust precision in favor of a manufactured plainness — to believe that “she walked slowly” is inherently worse than “she trudged,” regardless of whether trudging is the actual, specific thing the sentence needs to say. Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t, and the substitution just swaps one word for a worse one in order to satisfy a rule that was never meant to be applied this bluntly.

The Exactness Was the Point

I am not arguing for adverbial abundance. I am arguing that the war against modifiers has become a war against the writer’s willingness to be exact, and that exactness — not brevity for its own sake — was supposed to be the point all along.

1. King, S. (2000). On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
2. Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway.