To understand the difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb, consider these two sentences: "She smiled happily" and "She smiled sadly." Which one works best? The first seems weak because "smiled" contains the meaning of "happily." On the other hand, "sadly" changes the meaning.
Author Kurt Vonnegut uses adverbs with the frequency of an appearance of Halley's comet. I had to read several pages of his book Palm Sunday before I found one. Invited to deliver a Sunday sermon, he concludes the homily, "I thank you for your sweetly faked attention." Once again, "sweetly" adjusts the meaning of "faked." Good adverb.
Remember the song "Killing Me Softly"? Good adverb. How about "Killing Me Fiercely"? Bad adverb.
Look also for weak verb-adverb combinations that you can revise with stronger verbs: "She went quickly down the stairs" can become "She dashed down the stairs." "He listened surreptitiously" can become "He eavesdropped." Give yourself a choice.
I conclude with a disclaimer: The wealthiest writer in the world is J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. She loves adverbs, especially when describing speech. On two pages of her first book, I found these attributions:
"said Hermione timidly."
"said Hermione faintly."
"he said simply."
"said Hagrid grumpily."
"said Hagrid irritably."
If you want to make more money than the Queen of England, maybe you should use more adverbs. If your aspirations, like mine, are more modest, use them sparingly.
WORKSHOP
1. Look through the newspaper for any word that ends with -ly. If it's an adverb, cross it out and read the new sentence aloud. Which version works better?
2. Do the same for your last three pieces of writing. Circle the adverbs, delete them, and decide if the new sentence is stronger or weaker.
3. Read through your adverbs again and mark those that modify the verb rather than intensify it.
4. Search for weak verb-adverb combinations. "He spoke softly" might become "He whispered" or "He mumbled." If you come upon a weak combination, try a stronger verb to see if it improves the sentence.
An editor from Newsday told me the story of how he tried to help a reporter revise the top of a story. As often happens, the editor knew that the lead paragraph could be improved, but not how. As he walked down the hallway, story in hand, he looked up to see the Brobdingnagian figure of Jimmy Breslin, who agreed to take a peek at the problem.
"Too many -ings" said the legendary columnist.
"Too many whats?"
"Too many -ings."
Can a writer use too many words that end with -ing, and why should that be a problem?
To put it another way, why is "Wish and hope and think and pray" stronger than "Wishin' and hopin and thinkin' and prayin' "? With apologies to Dusty Springfield, the answer resides in the history of English as an inflected language. An inflection is an element we add to a word to change its meaning. For example, we add -s or -es to a noun to indicate the plural. Add -5 or -ed to a verb, and we distinguish present action from the past.
Add -ing to a verb, and it takes on a progressive sense — a happening, as in this 1935 description by Richard Wright of the wild celebration after a Joe Louis boxing victory (the emphasis is mine): "Then they began stopping street cars. Like a cyclone sweeping through a forest, they went through them, shouting, stamping." The passage survives the weak verb "went through," depending on a simile and those -ing words to create a sense of spontaneous action.
Consider this opening to the mystery novel The Big Sleep:
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
Even though author Raymond Chandler uses the static "was" five times, he creates a sense of the present — the here and now — by the injection of -ing words.
So the writer should not worry about the occasional and strategic use of an -ing word, only its overuse when the simple present or past tense will suffice. Sometimes a single -ing creates the desired effect. In this passage from a biography of U.S. Senator Bob Dole, we learn of the care he received after a terrible war injury:
Bob held on, and made it through the operation. The fever disappeared and the other kidney worked, and by fall, they'd chipped away the whole cast. Now they were trying to get him out of bed. They hung his legs over the edge of the mattress, but it made him weak with fatigue. It took days to get him on his legs, and then he shook so, with the pain and the strangeness, they had to set him back in bed.
Using the simple past tense, Richard Ben Cramer creates a scene that is vivid, clear, and dramatic. There, in the middle, rests a single exception ("they were trying") to describe immediate and continuous effort.
Let me attempt to write a paragraph with too many -ings:
Suffering under the strain of months of withering attacks, reservists stationed in Iraq are complaining to family members about the length of their tours of duty, and lobbying their congressional representatives about bringing more troops home soon.
There is nothing right or wrong about this sentence. It's just heavy on -ings, five of them, expressing a variety of syntactic forms:
• "Suffering" is a present participle, modifying "reservists."
• "Withering" is an adjective, modifying "attacks."
• "Complaining" and "lobbying" are progressive forms of verbs.
• "Bringing" is a gerund, a verb used as a noun.
Before I try to improve this passage, let me offer two reasons why -ing weakens a verb:
1. When I add -ing, I add a syllable to the word, which does not happen, in most cases, when I add -s or -ed. Let's take the verb to trick. First, I'll add -s, then -ed, giving me tricks and tricked. Neither change alters the root effect of the verb. Tricking, with its extra syllable, sounds like a different word.
2. The -ing words begin to resemble each other. Walking and running and cycling and swimming are all good forms of exercise, but I prefer to point out that my friend Kelly likes to walk, run, cycle, and swim.
What might a revised version of my Iraq passage look like? How about:
Reservists stationed in Iraq have suffered months of withering attacks. They have complained to family members about the lengths of their tours of duty and lobbied Congress to bring more troops home soon.
I cannot argue that this revision represents a significant improvement over the earlier version; it's perhaps a little cleaner and more direct. But now I know that this tool gives me choices I did not know I had. In the same way I test adverbs, I can now test my -ings.
Since I've learned this tool, I notice how I appreciate passages that are -ing lite. Listen to Kathleen Norris in Dakota:
Like many who have written about Dakota, I'm invigorated by the harsh beauty of the land and feel a need to tell the stories that come from its soil. Writing is a solitary act, and ideally, the Dako-tas might seem to provide a writer with ample solitude and quiet. But the frantic social activity in small towns conspires to silence a person. There are far fewer people than jobs to fill. Someone must be found to lead the church choir or youth group, to bowl with the league, to coach a softball team or little league, to run a Chamber of Commerce or club committee. Many jobs are vital: the volunteer fire department and ambulance service, the domestic violence hotline, the food pantry. All too often a kind of Tom Sawyerism takes over, and makes of adult life a perpetual club. Imagine spending the rest of your life at summer camp.
In a paragraph of 151 words, Norris gives us only two -ings. Not too many.
WORKSHOP
1. Read your recent work. Circle any word that ends with -ing. What have you discovered? Do you use t
oo many -ings?
2. If so, revise a few passages. See if you can knock off some -ings, using, instead, the simple present or past.
3. Notice the number of -ings in the work you admire.
4. If you come across a difficult passage to read or write, test it for -ings.
Everyone fears the long sentence. Editors fear it. Readers fear it. Most of all, writers fear it. Even I fear it. Look. Another short one. Shorter. Fragments. Frags. Just letters. F ... f... f. .. f. Can I write a sentence without words? Just punctuation?... #:!?
Write what you fear. Until the writer tries to master the long sentence, she is no writer at all, for while length makes a bad sentence worse, it can make a good sentence better.
My favorite Tom Wolfe essay from the early days of the New Journalism movement is "A Sunday Kind of Love," named after a romantic ballad of the period. The events described take place one morning in a New York subway station on a Thursday, not a Sunday. Wolfe sees and seizes a moment of youthful passion on the city underground to redefine urban romance.
Love! Attar of libido in the air! It is 8:45 A.M. Thursday morning in the IRT subway station at 50th Street and Broadway and already two kids are hung up in a kind of herringbone weave of arms and legs, which proves, one has to admit, that love is not confined to Sunday in New York.
That's a fine beginning. Erotic fragments and exclamation points. The concave/convex connection of love captured in "herringbone weave," the quick movement from short sentence to long, as writer and reader dive from the top of the ladder of abstraction, from love and libido, down to two kids making out, back up to variations on amour in the metropolis.
During rush hour, subway travelers learn the meaning of length: the length of the platform, the length of the wait, the length of the train, the length of the escalators and stairwells to ground level, the length of lines of hurried, grouchy, impatient commuters. Notice how Wolfe uses the length of his sentences to reflect that reality:
Still the odds! All the faces come popping in clots out of the Seventh Avenue local, past the King Size Ice Cream machine, and the turnstiles start whacking away as if the world were breaking up on the reefs. Four steps past the turnstiles everybody is already backed up haunch to paunch for the climb up the ramp and the stairs to the surface, a great funnel of flesh, wool, felt, leather, rubber and steaming alumicron, with the blood squeezing through everybody's old sclerotic arteries in hopped-up spurts from too much coffee and the effort of surfacing from the subway at the rush hour. Yet there on the landing are a boy and a girl, both about eighteen, in one of those utter, My Sin, backbreaking embraces.
This is classic Wolfe, a world where "sclerotic" serves as antonym for erotic, where exclamation points sprout like wildflowers, where experience and status are defined by brand names. ("My Sin" was a perfume of the day.) But wait! There's more! As the couple canoodles, a cavalcade of commuters passes by:
All round them, ten, scores, it seems like hundreds, of faces and bodies are perspiring, trooping and bellying up the stairs with arterio-sclerotic grimaces past a showcase full of such novel items as Joy Buzzers, Squirting Nickels, Finger Rats, Scary Tarantulas and spoons with realistic dead flies on them, past Fred's barbershop, which is just off the landing and has glossy photographs of young men with the kind of baroque haircuts one can get in there, and up onto 50th Street into a madhouse of traffic and shops with weird lingerie and gray hair-dyeing displays in the windows, signs for free teacup readings and a pool-playing match between the Playboy Bunnies and Downey's Showgirls, and then everybody pounds on toward the Time-Life Building, the Brill Building or NBC.
Has any reader ever experienced a more glorious long sentence, a more rollicking evocation of underground New York, a more dazzling 128 words from capital letter to period? If you find one, I'd like to read it.
A close reading of Wolfe suggests some strategies to achieve mastery of the long sentence:
• It helps if subject and verb of the main clause come early in the sentence.
• Use the long sentence to describe something long. Let form follow function.
• It helps if the long sentence is written in chronological order.
• Use the long sentence in variation with sentences of short and medium length.
• Use the long sentence as a list or catalog of products, names, images.
• Long sentences need more editing than short ones. Make every word count. Even. In. A. Very. Long. Sentence.
Writing long sentences means going against the grain. But isn't that what the best writers do? In his novel The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald uses the long sentence to explain — and mirror — the antique prose style of English essayist Sir Thomas Browne:
In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortege in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne's writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.
In the 1940s Rudolf Flesch described the effects that made a sentence "easy" or "hard" to read. According to Flesch, an 1893 study illuminated the shrinking English sentence: "The average Elizabethan written sentence ran to about 45 words; the Victorian sentence to 29; ours to 20 and less." Flesch used sentence length and syllable count as factors in his readability studies, an arithmetic once derided by E. B. White in his essay "Calculating Machine." "Writing is an act of faith," wrote White, "not a trick of grammar."
The good writer must believe that a good sentence, short or long, will not be lost on the reader. And although Flesch preached the value of the good eighteen-word sentence, he praised long sentences written by such masters as Joseph Conrad. So even for old Rudolf, a long sentence, well crafted, was not a sin against the Flesch.
WORKSHOP
1. Keep an eye out for well-crafted long sentences. Test them in context, using the criteria above.
2. During revision, most journalists take a longish sentence and break it up for clarity. But writers also learn to combine sentences for good effect. Review examples of your recent work. Combine shorter sentences for a richer variety of sentence structures and lengths.
3. Here's a passage from the novel The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby:
I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches the home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.
Revise this excerpt into a single sentence.
4. The best long sentences flow from good research and reporting. Review Wolfe's sentences above. Notice the details that come from direct observation and note taking. The next time you report in the field, look for scenes and settings that lend themselves to description in a long sentence.
5. Sentences can be divided into four structural categories: simple (one clause); complex (main clause plus dependent clauses); compound (more than one main clause); compound-complex. But a long sentence does not have to be compound or complex. It can be simple:
A tornado ripped through St. Petersburg Friday, tearing roofs off dozens of houses, shattering glass windows of downtown businesses, uprooting palm trees near bayside parks, and leaving Clyde Howard cowering in his claw-footed bathtub.
That thirty-four-word sentence is a simple sentence with one main clause ("A tornado ripped"). In this case the -ings help. Survey the contents of your purse, your wallet, or a favorite junk drawer. Write a long simple sentence to describe what's inside.
Writers shape
up their prose by building parallel structures in their words, phrases, and sentences. "If two or more ideas are parallel," writes Diana Hacker in A Writer's Reference, "they are easier to grasp when expressed in parallel grammatical form. Single words should be balanced with single words, phrases with phrases, clauses with clauses."
The effect is most obvious in the words of great orators, such as Martin Luther King Jr. (the emphasis is mine):
So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado.
Notice how King builds a crescendo from the repetition of words and grammatical structures, in this case a series of prepositional phrases with a noun designating mountains and an adjective defining majesty.
"Use parallels wherever you can," wrote Sheridan Baker in The Practical Stylist, "equivalent thoughts demand parallel constructions." Just after reading Baker, I stumbled on an essay by one of my favorite English authors, G. K. Chesterton, who wrote detective stories, books on religion, and literary essays early in the twentieth century. His more mannered style highlights the parallel structures in his sentences: "With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out on to the great downs." That sentence strides across the page on the legs of two parallel constructions: the fourfold repetition of "my," and the pair of pairs connected by "and."
The late Neil Postman argued that the problems of society could not be solved by information alone. He shaped his arguments around a set of parallel propositions:
If there are people starving in the world — and there are — it is not caused by insufficient information. If crime is rampant in the streets, it is not caused by insufficient information. If children are abused and wives are battered, that has nothing to do with insufficient information. If our schools are not working and democratic principles are losing their force, that too has nothing to do with insufficient information. If we are plagued by such problems, it is because something else is missing.
Writing Tools Page 3