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 ...

Ken Peng from Malaysia writes: What are linking adverbs - please give me some examples - and are they also called conjunctive adverbs? Xiao Ling from China writes: I'm having difficulty distinguishing ...

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 ...

If, somewhere out there in Grammarland, adverbs have their own post office, I’m sure my picture is hanging in it, probably above the caption “Public Enemy No. 1” or “Wanted Dead or Alive.” I don’t ...

I still remember the awful woman I met at a reception during an English Speaking Union meeting on George Street, Edinburgh, in 2008 (I I still remember the awful woman I met at a reception during an ...

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, ...