Sorry, English teachers!

Before I say what I'm gonna say, let me qualify myself. I have a degree in English and am a card-carrying grammar snob. I love parts of speech, purple prose, and flowery adjective trains. I have taught junior high and high school grammar and encourage the very style of writing I am about to trash.

So, if you are an English teacher, calm down! You may continue teaching the way you always have. This is for those who are past that stage and are ready to write publishable fiction.

When teaching reluctant eighth graders to put their imaginations on paper, we encourage adjectives and adverbs to make the writing more descriptive. We praise sentences like, "The gnarled old man walked slowly and painstakingly across the dirty floor."

However, you most likely are not a middle school essay writer and if you are, congratulations for being at the stage in writing where you are ready to take it to the next level. In publishable fiction, the fewer adjectives and adverbs you use, the better.

Huh? you may be thinking. How boring! I thought adjectives and adverbs pepped things up.

They do--in middle school. In professional-quality writing, they slow things down. Think of them as the cheap and easy way out, rather than the most descriptive. In the above sentence, if we whittled away the unnecessary qualifiers, we'd get a sentence more like this: "His back stooped with age, the man picked with painstaking concentration around the food cartons, cigarette butts, and yesterday's newspaper scattered across the soiled carpet."

An adjective or adverb used sparingly can be beneficial, but many times there is a better way to say what you're trying to say. We get in the habit of finding a noun and then plumping it up with a string of adjectives and think we've adequately described something. Most of the time, the better choice is to use more colorful verbs and even appositive phrases in the place of an adjective.

The goal is to paint a word picture, involving as many senses as possible, so that the readers don't see a simple one-dimensional cutout of your character, but feel as though they have been there.
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