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Writing Well

Reading these lines from On Writing Well made me smile at the times when I have done exactly the things the author enjoins:

Don’t use adverbs unless they do necessary work. Spare us the news that the winning athlete grinned widely. And while we’re at it, let’s retire “decidedly” and all its slippery cousins. Every day I see in the paper that some situations are decidedly better and others are decidedly worse, but I never know how decided the improvement is, or who did the deciding, just as I never know how eminent a result is that’s eminently fair, or whether to believe a fact that’s arguably true. “He’s arguably the best pitcher on the Mets,” the preening sportswriter writes, aspiring to Parnassus, which Red Smith reached by never using words like “arguably.” Is the pitcher—it can be proved by argument—the best pitcher on the team? If so, please omit “arguably.” Or is he perhaps—the opinion is open to argument—the best pitcher? Admittedly I don’t know. It’s virtually a toss-up

Keeping the prose spare is craft that needs more practice than the hobbyist writer is able to devote to the task. With that comes the wanton adverbs to help make the point that is either not worth making or should be made very differently.

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