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 ...

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 ...

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are,” said W. Somerset Maugham. That hasn’t prevented many writers (and non-writers, or Maugham himself) from ...

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 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, ...