Adverbs Are Good

Against the cult of "lean" writing

One hundred years ago, Ernest Hemingway imported the conventions of news journalism into fiction. This was revolutionary and many people have fond memories of reading The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls. Of the literary lions, Hemingway remains quite readable and all of his books are in print. His persona hasn’t aged as well, but Papa won history because most people who teach and talk about writing today operate entirely in his shadow.

Entirely is an adverb. I happily used it. Trigger warning: more adverbs to come.

Hemingway preached lean prose and the “iceberg” theory, keeping the true meaning of whatever you write “below” the surface. It is minimalism, and minimalism is a wonderful school of writing. There are many great minimalist writers. Notice I called it a school of writing—this implies there are other schools. Hemingway is roped in with modernists like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, but both novelists wrote very differently than Hemingway. I am far more partial to them; To the Lighthouse, The Waves, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! are some of the greatest books ever written in the English language. Hemingway lusted for adventure in every day life, but it was Faulkner and Woolf who were far more adventurous in form and imagination. They wrote fiction that, even by twenty-first century standards, would be regarded as radical if it were printed by one of the major publishing conglomerates. The same is true of Hemingway contemporary Henry Miller, who momentarily blew open the novel form.

Note, again, the use of an adverb.

Substack has tried, with much success, to foster a new writing community over the last year. Writers pass out tips on maintaining newsletters and penning op-eds. This is good. Recently, Substack began a “Substack Writers at Work” newsletter that offers advice to writers who are just starting out. I’m a professional, but I receive the emails and I’m always curious to see what is taught. The most recent post, from the author Sarah Fay, doled out some advice I do not agree with at all.

I’ll reproduce it below.

Cut adverbs that end in -ly

Adverbs that end in -ly signal weak verbs and lazy descriptions. As Ezra Pound (or Gertrude Stein—it’s unclear who) said to Ernest Hemingway, “Cut all adverbs and adjectives.”

Why? Because they make writing flabby and we’re being read in people’s inboxes, where lean = king.

In second grade, we’re taught that adding adjectives and adverbs is a good thing. No! Stop the madness! Your second-grade teacher was 100% wrong.

Typically, adverbs are superfluous.

Example: They completely believed in God.

Revised version: They believed in God.     

It’s like being a little pregnant: Either you believe or you don’t.

When it comes to voice and making sure you’re there and your readers feel like you’re talking to them, adverbs can be handy (“They, like, completely believed in God”), but you want to use them intentionally.

The fix

Type -ly in the search/find box of your document.

Sit back and watch them light up—for some of you, there will so many adverbs it will feel like a fireworks show.

Some adverbs will be worth keeping or even necessary (e.g., only), but cut any you wouldn’t fight for or that aren’t expressing the narrator’s voice.

Note: Do not try to correct for adverbs in the drafting stage. It will either slow you way down or paralyze you. As I said, you’re not a “bad writer” for using adverbs and adjectives; you simply attended second grade.

I also recommend (I almost just wrote highly recommend) questioning all adjectives. Despite what creative writing books and workshops would have you believe, they often dilute what you’re trying to say.

This is the first tip for writers who are trying to launch Substack newsletters. It is intended for novices or those intimidated, perhaps, by the idea of writing. If you are writing an Associated Press-style breaking news story—fire at the schoolhouse, the governor is resigning at noon—you should probably follow this advice. You’ve got to pare down your language and get to the point quickly. Give the public the facts. Be as clear as possible. If you’re at AP, Bloomberg, or the Wall Street Journal, you do what you have to do.

Otherwise, I hate this advice. I hate it for professionals and I really hate it—I can’t quite quit these adverbs—for new writers, for those trying to find themselves. Adjectives and adverbs enliven writing. They imbue it with style. Without style, you are absolutely lost. You are like everyone else.

You will fail in this marketplace if you are like everyone else.

What makes Substack good is everything this advice, ironically enough delivered on Substack, tries to destroy: the unvarnished, idiosyncratic, and singular voices that stand out, the voices that sound like nothing else out there. Freddie DeBoer on one of his acidic and transcendent rants, Vanessa Ogle on class consciousness and leaving journalism, Sam Kriss doing God-knows-what and making it great, Anne Kadet plumbing the dollar slice market, Justin Smith-Ruiu digressing on the nature of nostalgia and the California myth, Chris Jesu Lee on status anxiety and fiction, ARX-HAN on the death of wordcels, Celine Nguyen on the glory of San Francisco, Mo_Diggs on withering postmodernism …

None of these writers follow Fay’s advice. I am grateful for that.

The example of God irked me as well. Fay writes that there is no difference between “completely” believing in God and just believing in God. Therefore, “completely” qualifies as superfluous. This might work, grammatically or stylistically, if you are a devout Christian and cleave the entirety of Earth into believers and non-believers. But there are always gradations of belief. “Completely” connotes a degree of fervency—of giving yourself over—that the casual worshipper praying to God for the Mets to make the playoffs might not feel. When belief is complete, it is total. It is a surrender to God.

Adverbs and adjectives infuse writing with meaning. They make language more lush, more beautiful, and more violent; they make it, if need be, sublime. They introduce much-needed specificity. Without them, the mental image is hazy, and a building is merely a slab of gray, and not a six-story, red-brick apartment complex overlooking a railroad depot. Fay writes that adjectives often “dilute what you’re trying to say” without offering further examples or evidence. This is probably because any substantive work of literature would refute this claim on the first page. “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful,” is how Don DeLillo opens Underworld. It is among the great first lines of modern literature. The “American” adjective, rendered here as a standalone clause, elevates the sentence to the realm of myth. “Halfway” and “hopeful” are also adjectives and the sentence would wither without them. Fay’s rule on “belief” would, if applied here, rob DeLillo of his power—perhaps the novelist would be told one can merely “hope” or “not hope” and the concept of a shine in one’s eye being “halfway hopeful” is excessive, because why go halfway?

Because of the image. The point of writing, especially in our digitized world, is to force a once-slumbering mind to imagine, to compel the reader to feel. Most media is consumed passively; TikTok and streaming makes this more true than ever, so much entertainment passing through us like coffee and Coke turned to piss. Once, the verb “binge” carried a hint of crisis and shame. Binge-drinkers and binge-eaters required therapy or rehab. But cable cords were cut, appointment viewing died, and the internet became the staging ground of all life. Now, more than ever, good writing matters. What is good is subjective, but what is less subjective is what is memorable, what seizes you and does not let go. For that, adjectives and adverbs will be required.

Let’s talk business. My sense is that my rebuttal will only carry so much weight with a crowd that is less consumed with aesthetics. Fay argues adverbs ending in “ly” make “writing flabby and we’re being read in people’s inboxes, where lean = king.” This might be advice, at best, I’d give to someone writing a very particular and dry business newsletter. At worst, it represents thinking that is now a decade old, and doesn’t hold in the new internet era, especially on Substack. Length is no longer your enemy. Stressing SEO or firing off 300-word blog-style posts is as outdated as calling BuzzFeed the future of the internet. “Less is more” is the sort of advice you’d give if you were limited to a quarter box of newsprint. One of the great upsides of the internet, for writers, is the profound lack of limitations. You can sprawl. You can go long.

And guess what? This stuff does really well. In nearly four years of this Substack, Political Currents, do you want to know what my most popular piece, by the metrics, actually was? It was my 4,000-word analysis of the three segments of American culture. Large, meaty, meditative long-reads routinely outperform shorter pieces on the internet. When you want to go big, more people pay attention. When you’re running a newsletter and some people are paying for your insights, they want to feel they’re getting their money’s worth. No one pays me money so I can write fewer words on fewer topics. No one complains when an essay breaks two or three thousand words. If anything, the audience is grateful. That’s what I love about Substack. If I had more time, I’d only write at such length. I generated several hundred new subscribers off the Three Segments essay alone.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for shorter work. Some prefer quicker dispatches, either to meet a daily quota or because it’s their style. The best writing advice I can give, as someone who has published in many difference places of note, is to find what style works for you. Far too much writing advice is predicated on trying to impose a rigid minimalism on everyone because it sounds nice when Hemingway and the Associated Press do it. It’s not overly hard to teach reduction; as Fay wrote, it’s about singling out certain undesirable words and cutting them. Sentences shorn of their adjectives and adverbs are certainly shorter. This doesn’t mean, somehow, they’ve gotten better.