Adverbs (!)

[Hex]

So, I know adverbs are Bad Things and should be stamped out ruthlessly. I was wondering, though, if you *had* to get across the point that something was done breathlessly, which of these would be the least bad?

"Stop!" I said, breathlessly. "There's a dragon on the line."

"Stop!" I gasped. "There's a dragon on the line."

"Stop!" I struggled to catch my breath. "There's a dragon on the line."

hmm or I suppose:

"Stop!" I said, struggling to catch my breath. "There's a dragon on the line."


(and while I'm here and you're all so well-informed and obliging - what on earth is the difference between "smelled" and "smelt"? Not in the sense of iron, but odours).

 

[chrispenycate]

Adverbs are not "bad things". Overuse of adverbs can be considered an evil, if you so desire; but that "ruthlessly" in your first line strengthens the feeling, is not ornamental. Trying to write without adverbs at all removes a colour from your palette, and impoverishes your flexibility of expression. Too many adjectives can also treacle a piece down to crawling pace, but nobody suggests you should eliminate them from your writing.

And one can achieve a very pompous, overblown style without any recourse to the much-maligned adverb. (Quoth he, demonstratingly)

 

[Paulleon]

If we can assume that the character has stopped running to shout, then I would go with whatever I would actually do myself if it were me who had stopped running. i.e.
‘Stop,’ I said doubling over and sucking each breath of air down as if it were my last, ‘there’s a dragon…on the line’.
I suppose it’s personal preference but I try and keep out those sort of words, though admittedly sometimes there is no choice.

 

[RJM Corbet]

So, I know adverbs are Bad Things and should be stamped out ruthlessly. I was wondering, though, if you *had* to get across the point that something was done breathlessly, which of these would be the least bad?

"Stop!" I said, breathlessly. "There's a dragon on the line."

"Stop!" I gasped. "There's a dragon on the line."

"Stop!" I struggled to catch my breath. "There's a dragon on the line."

hmm or I suppose:

"Stop!" I said, struggling to catch my breath. "There's a dragon on the line."


(and while I'm here and you're all so well-informed and obliging - what on earth is the difference between "smelled" and "smelt"? Not in the sense of iron, but odours).

If it bothers you, perhaps change it more radically.

"There's a dragon on the line!" I wheezed, trying to catch my breath. "Stop! For God's sake -- stop!"

I would guess that the flower he smelled smelt like a rose? But I'm not sure?

EDIT: Sorry Paulleon, your post came through while I was writing mine ... same thought exactly, but better

 

[Colbey Frost]

Your writing and scene should make the reader feel like the character is out of breath? What happened just before he said that? If he / she had been runnign flat out, or a fire had sucked the oxegen from the air, then "said" would be enough enough anyway. They should get the feeling for whats going on.

 

[seaside]

Adverbs are not "bad things". Overuse of adverbs can be considered an evil, if you so desire; but that "ruthlessly" in your first line strengthens the feeling, is not ornamental. Trying to write without adverbs at all removes a colour from your palette, and impoverishes your flexibility of expression. Too many adjectives can also treacle a piece down to crawling pace, but nobody suggests you should eliminate them from your writing.

And one can achieve a very pompous, overblown style without any recourse to the much-maligned adverb. (Quoth he, demonstratingly)

So they are okay then?

I've grown afraid of adverbs because every writing guide I've read, including the Strunk, have said to avoid them. Some go as far as to say eliminate all adverbs. College English teachers have forbidden them too. I've used a few when I can't think of another way to say it, but it makes me uncomfortable. I can just see an agent looking over my writing, and the second he sees an adverb, gets out his rejection letter.

 

[HareBrain]

Some go as far as to say eliminate all adverbs. College English teachers have forbidden them too.

Probably because it's far easier to forbid something outright than to teach when it works well and when it doesn't. You don't need to eliminate adverbs. You should question how useful each one is.

 

[Hex]

OK, perhaps I was exaggerating the case against adverbs, but as seaside says, pretty much all the writing guides tell you they're to be avoided, the sign of a beginner, that any agent will instantly burn your manuscript if they see one (and over at the critters writer workshop thing, people often seem to include this advice in their critiques).

Glad to hear I can use one every now and then (thank you, Chris, for your robust defence of the adverb - it made me smile, she wrote, happily). I like your point, HareBrain. It makes a lot of sense.

I'm not really writing about there being a dragon on the line. I promise. And I am inclined to get a bit overexcited in moments of excitement and overwhelm the reader with a lot of information - to be able to replace a description of gasping for breath with the word "breathlessly" (which I rather like) would help me to simplify. I'm sure there are other ways too.

(I was re-reading Harry Potter the other day and I noticed that almost every time someone speaks they do so "softly" or "quietly" or "calmly" (that was a passage where most of the speaking was done by Dumbledore). I must say, when I read the books the first - several - times I didn't notice the adverbs at all).

 

[RJM Corbet]

Pity!

I quite liked the dragon on the railway line. I was wondering what was going to happen next

 

[Hex]

Pity!

I quite liked the dragon on the railway line. I was wondering what was going to happen next

Oh well in that case...

 

[The Judge]

Always aim to use the best word in the best sentence. If that best word is an adverb, use it.

Having said that, I frankly (ha!) don't feel that "breathlessly" is the best word in those examples. If it was me, I'd go for your last version. Paulleon's version is a little OTT for my taste, particularly as it's so long -- you need to be getting to the punchy part of the story far quicker than that. And Christian's is too Hemingwayesque for me. Sometimes "said" isn't enough -- and for me this is one of those times.

Why they are frowned upon, I imagine, is because they are a tiny bit lazy -- it is so much easier to put "he moved quietly" instead of looking for a more evocative verb, eg crept, sneaked, slithered, slunk, stole, glided. Now it may be that having examined those words and others -- all of which have different shades of meaning -- none of them fits the sentence exactly, so you come back to "quietly". If so, fine -- just don't go round throwing them everywhere without thought. Use them as light seasoning, not as gravy.


And "smelt" is simply a variation of "smelled" in UK English, so use whatever sounds best in the sentence. I'm pretty sure it's not an acceptable variant in American English, along with others such as dreamt instead of dreamed, which is something to bear in mind, perhaps. An advantage of it, though, is it can set up the scene for puns, particularly if the smell is near a fishmongers!

 

[HareBrain]

One time adverbs can be useful is when you're describing an action where there isn't a great palette of verbs. For example, laughing. There are tens of different types of laughter in real-life human interaction, but apart from "laugh" itself, most of the verbs sound faintly (oops!) ridiculous: giggle, chuckle, guffaw, chortle, etc. An adverb is one (but of course not the only) way you can get across the shade of laughter you want.

 

[Jake Reynolds]

As ever, everything in controlled moderation.

I'm trying to find something on Tom Swifties...

Aha, found something, from www.fun-with-words.com

"The doctor had to remove my left ventricle," said Tom half-heartedly.
"Your Honour, you're crazy!" said Tom judgementally.

The quip takes its name from Tom Swift, a boy's adventure hero created by the prolific American writer Edward L. Stratemeyer. Under the pseudonym Victor Appleton, he published a series of books featuring the young Tom Swift. Tom Swift rarely passed a remark without a qualifying adverb as "Tom added eagerly" or "Tom said jokingly". The play on words discussed here arose as a pastiche of this, coming to be known by the term Tom Swifty.

In a true Tom Swifty, it is an adverb (word specifying the mode of action of the verb) that provides the pun, as in examples (1) to (4).


"Elvis is dead," said Tom expressly.
"I swallowed some of the glass from that broken window," Tom said painfully.

But frequently the pun occurs in the verb, and there may not be an adverb at all. Strictly speaking such puns are not Tom Swifties, but they are generally included in the term.


"My garden needs another layer of mulch," Tom repeated.
"You must be my host," Tom guessed.

And sometimes it is neither a verb, nor an adverb, but a short phrase (usually acting like an adverb in modifying the verb):

"I've only enough carpet for the hall and landing," said Tom with a blank stare.
"Don't let me drown in Egypt!" pleaded Tom, deep in denial.

Traditionally Tom is the speaker, but this is by no means necessary for the pun to classify as a Tom Swifty. Sometimes the pun lies in the name, in which case it will usually not be Tom speaking:

"Who discovered radium?" asked Marie curiously.
"I'm going to end it all," Sue sighed.

Many – probably most – Tom Swifties are morphological; i.e. the words must be broken down into morphemes (smaller components) to understand the pun. This is true for many of the examples on this page, and is illustrated particularly well by these:

"This is the real male goose," said Tom producing the propaganda.
"The cat sounds as if she's happy now she's been fed," said Tom purposefully.

Often the adverb (or whatever) has a homonym (a word which is pronounced, and perhaps spelled, the same, but has a different meaning) which leads to the punning meaning of the sentence:

"I have a split personality," said Tom, being frank.
"I love hot dogs," said Tom with relish.
There is a special kind of homonym called a homophone. Homophones are homonyms which are spelled differently. We saw examples of homophonic puns in (6) and (7) above. These also contain homophones:

"There's no need for silence," Tom allowed.
"I won't finish in fifth place," Tom held forth.

 

[Anne Lyle]

"Stop!" I gasped. "There's a dragon on the line."

"Stop!" I struggled to catch my breath. "There's a dragon on the line."

hmm or I suppose:

"Stop!" I said, struggling to catch my breath. "There's a dragon on the line."

Any of those work for me - it really depends how they fit in with the surrounding sentences. As has been mentioned, overdoing the beat (i.e. the action that accompanies the dialogue) in an effort to be vivid can rob your work of pace and turn it into purple prose. Save the poetic imagery for the moments in your story that count!

The occasional adverb is fine and even necessary, even in English with its plethora of synonyms. You just want to avoid the amateurish effect (which I saw very recently on another forum) of modifying practically every verb with one!

(and while I'm here and you're all so well-informed and obliging - what on earth is the difference between "smelled" and "smelt"? Not in the sense of iron, but odours).

"smelt" is a UK variant. They mean much the same thing, but have subtle nuances of rhythm:

"Last night I dreamed of Manderley" (opening words of Rebecca, by British writer Daphne du Maurier), with its long vowel, sounds much more evocative than the modern, colloquial "Last night I dreamt of Manderley" would have done.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Some go as far as to say eliminate all adverbs. College English teachers have forbidden them too.

Then they are wrong. Look through the published books you have on your shelves and you will see this. If using too many adverbs is a newbie mistake, saying that you must remove all of them is almost as bad.

I've used a few when I can't think of another way to say it, but it makes me uncomfortable. I can just see an agent looking over my writing, and the second he sees an adverb, gets out his rejection letter.

You shouldn't feel uncomfortable. Use the right word in the right situation, and don't worry about agents who search through manuscripts seeking to stamp out a perfectly good part of speech. They have better things to do than count adverbs (although you are quite right that there are people who will try to convince you that this is what they do). If the writing is working, they won't notice a single adverb. If a writer is consistently using adverbs as the lazy way out instead of looking for more specific verbs that would do the job better, than the writing won't work.

In my opinion, a writer does better to go through and make certain that each word he or she writes is the best one to do the job, and not worry about whether it's an adverb or not. In most cases, a specific term is better than a more general one, but this is not an immutable rule.

 

[chrispenycate]

Pity!

I quite liked the dragon on the railway line. I was wondering what was going to happen next

You're making assumptions there (although if it were one of my tales it would be quite likely you were shouting to a dragon driving the train. Way below her seniority, of course, but she enjoys it enough to put herself on the rota as often as she can get away with it). Admittedly, dragons perching Busby-like on telephone wires or high tension cables give serious problems for linemen, but "on the line" for telephones can also suggest that one wishes to talk to you from some considerable distance (recommended for discussions with the beasts), there's always the possibility that what you thought was your fish hook catching a tree while you were casting was something larger than predicted taking the bait, or someone might have laundered a Chinese festival costume and hung it out to dry…

All of which fails to specify an acceptable density of adverbs in a piece. It is obvious this will be a flexible figure, changing not only from book to book, but section to section, and probably erring in the direction of sparsity is advisable. I doubt the Harry Potter books sold better because of speech volume qualifications, but they don't seem to have driven many clients away.

 

[slack]

So they are okay then?

I've grown afraid of adverbs because every writing guide I've read, including the Strunk, have said to avoid them. Some go as far as to say eliminate all adverbs. College English teachers have forbidden them too. I've used a few when I can't think of another way to say it, but it makes me uncomfortable. I can just see an agent looking over my writing, and the second he sees an adverb, gets out his rejection letter.

In On Writing, Stephen King suggests they be cut out whenever possible, but look at his work and you'll see them pop up occasionally. The point is that you should question their use every time, because oftentimes the writing can be improved by choosing a stronger verb.

 

[D_Davis]

I would prefer this:

"Stop!" I said. "There's a dragon on the line."

With the catching my breath part conveyed through the action. Personally, I never like qualifiers to the I/he/she said, because I think the way something is said should be told in context to the action of the narrative.

I don't like it when authors use I gasped, or stuff like I said ruthlessly, because I should be able to tell how something was said by what is happening when the dialog is being spoken. I think it makes for stronger, more concrete writing.

 

[D_Davis]

In other (more concise!) words, show how the characters are saying their dialog, don't tell.

 

[RJM Corbet]

You're making assumptions there (although if it were one of my tales it would be quite likely you were shouting to a dragon driving the train. Way below her seniority, of course, but she enjoys it enough to put herself on the rota as often as she can get away with it). Admittedly, dragons perching Busby-like on telephone wires or high tension cables give serious problems for linemen, but "on the line" for telephones can also suggest that one wishes to talk to you from some considerable distance (recommended for discussions with the beasts), there's always the possibility that what you thought was your fish hook catching a tree while you were casting was something larger than predicted taking the bait, or someone might have laundered a Chinese festival costume and hung it out to dry…

All of which fails to specify an acceptable density of adverbs in a piece. It is obvious this will be a flexible figure, changing not only from book to book, but section to section, and probably erring in the direction of sparsity is advisable. I doubt the Harry Potter books sold better because of speech volume qualifications, but they don't seem to have driven many clients away.

But Crispen, everyone knows dragons HATE water and NEVER roost in trees -- or on wires. However, as they do run up phone bills like it's going out of fashion ...