{"id":13762,"date":"2011-07-10T10:33:43","date_gmt":"2011-07-10T14:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/07\/10\/13762.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:59:59","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:59:59","slug":"father-daughter-and-lolly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/07\/10\/father-daughter-and-lolly\/","title":{"rendered":"Father, daughter and lolly"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The excellent Benjamin Rosenbaum wrote On Adverbs<\/a> the other day. There is, you know, a Rule of Writing that is given more or less as don’t use adverbs<\/i>; this is not entirely Strunk and White’s fault, but it comes from what you might call Strunkian thinking. I loathe that rule.\n

But something occurred to me, when I was reading Mr. Rosenbaum’s note. Mr. Rosenbaum, by the way, was neither defending the rule nor attacking it, but was sensibly pointing out that adverbs, as tools, have good uses and bad, and thoughtful placement of adverbs was part of some good writing. That is, he rejected the extreme form of the rule, which one would think would be a straw man if one hadn’t had conversations with people who believe that adverbs are the sign of Bad Writing—also the passive voice, the split infinitive, the sentence modifier, and beginning a sentence with and<\/i>. But I am speaking here of adverbs, as was Mr. Rosenbaum, and he interrupts himself in an offhand way, the way he does, with this parenthesis: Adverbs (of the kind you mean; \"now\" is after all also an adverb, but you don’t mean that)<\/i>.\n

Wait, what? In one sweep, Mr. Rosenbaum sweeps away the bulk of my rejection of the Bad Adverb Rule. He simply acknowledges that the word adverb<\/I> in the Bad Adverb Rule doesn’t mean the same thing as the word adverb<\/I> in a grammatical study. He doesn’t mock the idea, and he doesn’t even explain what an adverb really is, to show the stupidity of the rule. I have used the opening sentence of The Stranger<\/i> to highlight the absurdity of the rule, and would in fact challenge any strict defender to improve the opening; Mr. Rosenbaum just (wearily? Or is that my imagination) moves on to the adverbs of the kind you mean<\/i>. I stand amazed by this. It would never have occurred to me, not in a million years. Just of the kind you mean<\/i> and move on. Wow.\n

So, I’m starting to wonder if the rule does in fact have some use when restricted to adverbs of the kind you mean<\/i>. The problem is that having, to my earliest recollection of knowing how I wanted to write, what kinds of writing I wanted to imitate, rejected Strunkian thinking entirely and certainly rejected the Bad Adverb rule, I honestly have no idea what adverbs are of the kind you mean<\/i>. That is—yes, I can quickly rule out a bunch that are not of the kind you mean<\/i>, like Mr. Camus’ famous one. Or in sentences like She lives downstairs from me<\/i> or He arrived early<\/i>; perhaps the Bad Adverb people do not want us to rewrite those sentences to use adjectives instead. Which leaves things in the she drove slowly, slowly through the woods<\/i> and The flash was blindingly bright<\/i>; are those the ones they mean?\n

Part of my problem is that I don’t believe in adverbs at all anymore. I blame the Language Log<\/a> for this. There just doesn’t seem to be any definition of adverb<\/i> that satisfies me, even with the syndrome-based concept of definition that grammar seems to require. Nouns? Nouns are complicated, but they do seem to exist. Verbs? Sure, verbs. Adjectives? I suppose that the category of modifiers-that-only-apply-to-nouns is well-defined enough to accept. But adverbs? What the hell are adverbs? Or, rather, what the hell isn’t<\/i> an adverb?\n

If you give me a piece of writing, I think I can identify the adverbs in it, but if the writing is at all complicated, I’m going to identify everything else, and then just double-check what is left to make sure they don’t fit another category, and then call ’em adverbs, and that’s how I identify adverbs these days. Which is, perhaps, why I hate the rule so much.\n

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room&#8212a certain Betty, whose slumbers must not be disturbed until six o’clock struck, when she wakened of herself ‘as sure as clockwork’, and left the household very little peace afterwards. It was a June morning, and early as it was, the room was full of sunny warmth and light.<\/blockquote>\n

That’s the opening paragraph of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters<\/i>. Take a moment and identify the adverbs. There are, I think, three in the first sentence and one in the second, not counting adverbial phrases and clauses, of which there are at least a dozen. I also have no idea if the rule is generally considered to apply to adverbial phrases—it would make no logical sense to claim that adverbs weaken prose and distance the reader from the narrative (or whatever the argument is ) but that adverbial phrases are good strong vibrant immediate writing, but then it would make no logical sense to send people scouring their writing for adverbs<\/i> if you mean adverbial phrases as well, which are trickier to spot. Anyway, there’s a paragraph, and there are the adverbs.\n

Now, many Gentle Readers will, YHB imagines, find that paragraph to be Bad Writing. I love it. I adore this book, and I adore the way that Mrs. Gaskell writes, and I like (it turns out) quite a bit of this nineteenth-century style of storytelling. Is it distant? Perhaps it is, I am not altogether sure. Certainly the writer is present, and stands between the reader and the story. Some people find that boring, and if you don’t like the writer, you can’t forget about her, and that will inhibit your enjoyment of the story. Which is why I accept that many people will never enjoy reading the works of Charles Dickens; if you aren’t fond of his voice, you can’t enjoy his stories. It does not follow that the stories are Bad Writing<\/i>.\n

I’m not denying the existence of Bad Writing, mind you. I’m just saying that there’s more than one kind of writing that isn’t Bad, and some of the writing that isn’t Bad has adverbs.\n

Now, I’m talking about storytelling and fiction writing, but Gentle Readers will have already noted that YHB applies this to blog writing as well; my stylistic attempts, whether successful or not, adhere to my own sensibility and taste, and not to Strunkian thinking or any other theory of writing. This is not because I am a Good Writer—I’m not even a careful writer—but then I don’t know why I would approach the thing any different if I were to think myself a Good Writer. And when I advise My Perfect Non-Reader in her writing, which she has begun to do, I do not tell her to avoid doing those things that a Good Writer can do, and stick to those things that a Beginning Writer can do—or worse, simply avoid doing the things that a Bad Writer does. I tell her to write the way the writing calls for, whether that is the dreaded and dreadful Five Paragraph Essay or a play for her and her friends to put on. I suspect that this means she will run up against an assignment where she will limit her use of adverbs (or at any rate adverbs of the kind you mean<\/i>) in order to get a good grade, and I will encourage her to do it, while explaining why I think it’s a terrible rule.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger, far from believing that as Mr. Rosenbaum claims removing an adverb strengthens a sentence ninety-five times out of a hundred, claims in fact that any bad sentence that contains an adverb can be made worse by rewriting it without any adverbs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13762"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19382,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13762\/revisions\/19382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}