MAD’s sixth writing rule – Adverbs, Adverbs, Everywhere

So, most people know what an adverb is. They are words that modify other words.

They can modify a verb – She walked to the door slowly. (How did she walk to the door?)

They can modify an adverb – She walked quite slowly down the hall. (How slowly did she walk?)

They can modify an adjective – She rode a very fast horse. (How fast was her horse?)

Basically, adverbs tell when, where and why something is happening.

The most common ones are what we in the industry call “ly” words (angrily, blindly, easily, happily, poorly, rapidly, slowly, etceteraly,) but not always. Almost, always, less, more, often, and well can also be adverbs. In addition, there are words that end in “ly” that are not adverbs. Motherly and friendly, for example, are adjectives.

That motherly woman you like works in a friendly bakery.

To make adverbs even more confusing, you have Adverb Clauses. These are a group of words that contain a subject and a verb but act as an adverb.

When this movie is over, we are going to the park. (When are we going to the park?)

And for the monkey in the wrench, I give you Prepositional Phrases and Infinitive Phrases. These are a group of words that do not contain a subject or verb, but still act as an Abverbial Phrase.

She went to the park. (Where did she go?)

He lived in Germany during the invasion. (Where did he live?)

They ran to catch the plane. (Where did they run?)

He flew to America to see his mother. (Why did he fly to America?)

She picks flowers as often as possible. (When does she pick flowers?)

***And you thought this was going to be an easy rule!***

Actually, Adverbs are an easy MAD rule. Let me explain.

Again, I will reiterate what I have said before. If you are going to write professionally you need to learn all of the rules of the English language – and that is not easy. The biggest issue with our language is that most of us do not use the majority of the rules (except a few crazy English professors.) We communicate with each other, and we speak the words in English, but almost no one understands how our language is put together. Many professionals are just as confused as you are. I know I am still confused on many topics of the English language. The problem is schools don’t really teach it anymore. None at all in our lower education systems and very little in our higher education systems. And the fact is, for the most part, you don’t need to know the majority of the rules for day to day life. The average Joe-Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, Bus Driver, Manager, etc. does not need to know but about 25% of the rules of English to communicate with his fellow workers. The funny thing is, at 25% both the average Joe, as well as all of his fellows, think they are using 95% of the rules correctly!

O.K., let me get off my soapbox now. Why is the above statement important? It is important so that you can start to understand that the way you communicate – the way you talk with your fellows – is not going to cut it in your written work - Adverbs being the number one issue for most people.

The majority of us use adverbs like they are going out of style. It is easier in a conversation to use them, they are very descrīptive, and everyone understands them.

“Yo! You are totally not going to believe this. So I was slowly walking down the street and this car came whipping around the corner, completely out of control. I was barely able to jump out of the way! It nearly hit me! If I had been blindly minding my own business, that guy would have honestly run me down. My day would have ended badly, dude.”

That is how we speak. There is nothing wrong with it for communication. You know that the person who said the above was very upset at his near death experience. Plus, they descried the incident in a very dynamic way. You can almost feel like you were there.

So, as a story teller why is the above bad? It is bad for two reasons. The fist being that if you write your narrative in the above fashion, no agent – much less a publisher – is going to pick you up. The second reason is that it is just plain ole lazy writing. You just don’t need to write that way.

Two things before we get going.

First and foremost, forget about adverb clauses, prepositional and infinitive phrases. Why? We are story tellers, not English professors. We need to know our craft well and part of that is knowing what is important, and what is not. (Again, I recommend that you know what adverb clauses, prepositional and infinitive phrases are inside and out. Then you can understand why we, as authors, can ignore them for the most part.)

Second, the above example of how we speak was written in dialog format. The nice thing about dialog is that all bets are off. You want your dialog to sound like people actually speak, so that example would not need to be edited. The adverbs are used correctly. On the same token, you will note that I use a lot of adverbs in this blog. That is because I am trying to write this blog in a very conversational tone to make it easier to understand. Oh, yea, and you are not paying me to write this, SO GET OFF MY BACK!

Now you should have enough background that we are finally ready for the actual lesion.

Keep in mind, I am not here to teach you English. Personally, I think I stink at English. I am here to help you become a better writer, however. So lets drop the technical English crap and get on to MAD’s sixth rule of writing.

So what is MAD’s sixth rule of writing? It really boils down to the “ly” words. They are the ones that jump out at agents, editors and publishers. Plus, I will agree that they are lazy writing. For example…

John walked slowly across the room.

There is nothing wrong with the above. It simply does not invite the reader inside the mind of John. Let’s get a little more detailed.

Dragging his feet, John dreaded reaching the other side of the room.

See the difference? In the first example, John is a slow walker. In the second, there is some impending doom awaiting John that he is not anxious to deal with.

The cool thing is that “ly” words are easy to replace. The first step is to bring them to your attention.

Once I am finished with a section of work, I simply use MS word’s find/replace feature to point out all my “ly” words. Here is what I do for the best effect.

First, before you do anything else select the green highlight color. This should be up on your toolbar. (Use MS help if you need more information on how to do this.) Then choose “edit” then “replace” from the menu list. In the “Find what:” box, type in ly. Just the letters ly nothing else. In the “Replace with:” box, again type in ly. Just ly no period. Now hit the “More” button for more options. Put a checkmark next to “Match Case” then hit the format button and choose Highlight. Finally hit the “Replace All” button and give it a second.

Word will now go through your work and highlight every ly word that you have. It will also highlight things that do not apply. Say, for instance, you have a character named Ilyian. It is going to highlight the ly in the middle. That is O.K.

Now that you have all of your “ly” words tagged, start scrolling through the work and take a look at what Word has shown you.

My rule of thumb is to have only one “ly” word every one to two pages. Do you have several per paragraph? Well, now you know that you over use them.

Start with the easy ones…

As you read you will notice that some “ly” words can simply be deleted without loosing the meaning of your sentence.

As you read you will notice that some “ly” words can be deleted without loosing the meaning of your sentence.

(See what I did? Cleaver, huh?)

Yet some are as easy as that. Just read each sentence that word has marked your “ly” word in. Then reread the sentence omitting the “ly” word. Are they the same? Then delete the “ly” word.

Another easy fix is to look for redundancy…

When the rock heated, John quickly snatched his hand away.

There is no other way to “snatch” something other than quick. So, to quickly snatch is redundant and the quickly can be deleted.

The next thing to do is look for ways to add more detail…

John bowed his head sheepishly to avoid eye contact.

John bowed his had and ground a toe of his shoe into the dirt to avoid eye contact.

You not only get rid of an “ly” word, you give you character a little more action. Plus, you are “showing” (remember MAD’s rule #5?) instead of “telling” that he is acting sheepish.

Others you may have to spend some time with. If a replacement does not jump to your mind quickly, skip it. Let it be your one “ly” word on that page.

You do not need to kill yourself trying to cull all the “ly” words out of your manuscrīpt. The fact is, sometimes, John walks slowly across the room.

Drake