Aspiring science-fiction authors receive one piece of advice above all others: Forsake the adverb, the killer of prose. It’s terribly, awfully, horrendously important. But why? Really, adverbs aren’t ...

“John quickly pulled out his gun, shakily aimed it at Joe, and angrily shot him dead.” There’s one way you might write a line of fiction (or, if you’re a member of my immediate family, memoir). Here’s ...

So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to avoid adverbs and adjectives (Zinsser 2006). Adjectives and adverbs sprinkle paper with unnecessary ...

Recently, statistical bioinformatician Neil Saunders decided to look for sentence adverbs in close to 100,000 scientific abstracts. (You know sentence adverbs: “Remarkably, the guinea pigs were ...

I am gladly, fully, openly in support of adverbs. Despite our democratic ideals, schoolchildren throughout America learn that not all words are created equal: Nouns and verbs make sense of the world, ...

David John Moore Cornwell, better known by his pen name John Le Carre, passed away in December. The author of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” leaves behind a ...

Our discussion of flat adverbs continues today as we, firstly, add more examples. I hope you remember what flat adverbs are: those that do not carry -ly. Rather, they have the same forms as adjectives ...

No part of speech has had to put up with so much adversity as the adverb. The grammatical equivalent of cheap cologne or trans fat, the adverb is supposed to be used sparingly, if at all, to modify ...