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 ...

Remember voting for senior class superlatives? One female and one male student would be named “Best Dressed” or “Most Likely to Succeed” or “Best School Spirit.” Only one student from each gender ...

“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 ...

Ah, the adverb train station. If you want to find out about adverbs, there is no better place. An adverb tells you how something happens. Here is a train moving "quickly" on the track. “Quickly” is an ...

Consider one of William Strunk’s better pieces of advice in “The Elements of Style”: “Omit needless words.” Now consider this rejoinder from University of Edinburgh Linguistics professor Geoffrey ...

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 ...

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 ...

Dearly, Nearly, Insincerely: What Is an Adverb? by Brian Cleary, illus. by Brian Gable, is the newest entry in the Words Are Categorical series. A playful rhyming text (""Adverbs tell us when and how.

I couldn’t agree more with the meaning of that slogan. But what about its grammar? Purists would argue that people don’t drive “drunk”; rather, they say, people “drive drunkenly” or they “drive in a ...