Indubitably.
My take is that you should follow Strunk and White’s rule unless you’re Bradbury or Lovecraft or Dickens. In other words, when you have honed your craft well enough and have learned the rules, then you’re ready to pick and choose which guidelines to break for your desired effect. I don’t have Strunk and White in front of me, but they list several passages of writers who broke the rules and were good nonetheless. (I remember one writer was Richard Burton the actor, of all people).
Needless to say, most of us mortals will will forget Strunk and White at our peril.
And then Professor Jones shot him.
But I don’t think you’ve simplified your example much at all. In fact, sometimes you’ve complicated it. (“as open as the Martian fields” vs “as open and empty as the Martian fields”. Is “Each wave was stronger than the one before it.” really simpler than “Each wave different, and each wave stronger.”
Bradbury’s prose IS simple, it eschews adverbs and adjectives. It describes using metaphors rather than just telling.
Anyway, if you have to add “he said, menacingly” to the end of the thug’s dialog, can it really be that menacing? Put menacing words in the thug’s mouth and the reader will have no problem understanding that the words were said menacingly. But if the words themselves aren’t menacing then telling the reader they were menacing accomplishes nothing.
OK, I’ve heard this argument before, and I can see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it takes into account the fact that people normally communicate through their tone of voice as well as their choice of words. And since you can’t actually hear the person’s voice when you’re reading dialogue on the printed page, it seems to me that the most linguistically efficient way to communicate how somebody said something is through an adverb.
I suppose you could make the argument that all dialogue in fiction should be so polished and brilliant that readers can “hear” the nuances of the speaker’s voice through the word choice, but I’m not sure that’s a realistic goal.
That’s a valid point, but I think you’re assuming that written dialogue should mirror actual spoken English, when it doesn’t. Off-the-cuff speech never has the clarity and grammatical precision that one finds in even the clumsiest literary dialogue.
Try transcribing an ordinary person’s actual words sometime; it’s full of “um” and “uh” and “like,” and half-sentences, and backing up to restate or elaborate, and so on. If you wrote a character’s speech the way people actually talk in conversation, it would come across as near-gibberish.
When we read, though, we read with the unstated assumption that there is an intelligence directing the novel; we expect a plot, and maybe a story arc, and some kind of theme of humanistic or literary merit, and so on. We know this isn’t life; a novel describing actual life, with its unfinished plotlines and lack of tidy summing-up or character development, would be excruciatingly dull.
Written dialogue is an extraordinarily artificial mode of language, so far removed from actual speech that if someone actually spoke that way we’d suspect that person was a robot. Or an asshole.
I’ve digressed quite a bit here. My point is that, while a real person’s words are often augmented by their tone of voice, skillfully written dialogue can let the reader hear that tone of voice without having to tack on an “and by the way, he said that morosely.” Adding an adverb that way suggests, to my ear at least, that the author either doesn’t trust the reader to get his point, or doesn’t trust himself to make his point. Either way, it’s overbearing and distracting.
On a different but related topic, here’s something I used to do in grad school when I was trying to get hold of a writer’s style: Pick a paragraph at random and do a word-count on it. Count how many nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc. are in the sample. Also maybe count how many words have four or more syllables, how many have just one, the average number of words per sentence, clauses per sentence, setences per paragraph, and so on. You’ll get an interesting, and often surprising, portrait of the writer’s technique, as distinct from content.
Your/Zinsser’s version is certainly more muscular, but IMHO it doesn’t have the beauty or flair of Bradbury’s, though writing today is clearly trending toward the former.
Few if any hard rules survive in writing, but in my mind, the difference between your version and Bradbury’s is the difference between throwaway newspaper journalism and a crackling good read. Exceptions abound of course but, ultimately, it’s a case of some prefering jazz, others rock or hip-hop.
Which is exactly my point. One of the reasons I HATE reading King (though not the only) is the plainess of the words. That is true of a lot of current writing. It is bland. As someone else noted, the richness of Bradbury is the metaphor and general use of language.
If you, like me, prefer Bradbury. Then a reading of the Zinsser link will horrify you.
I think it is terrible advice for a fiction author – but great advice for a journalist.
Og bless you! I couldn’t even make it through the first (and shortest) Rowling novel, thanks to her unwieldy prose.
The use, and occasionally the overuse, of adjectives and adverbs isn’t always bad. When the specific intent is to play with the language–I’m thinking of Douglas Adams or P.G. Wodehouse here, or intentionally awkward as with Tom Swifties–it can be entertaining in and of itself. But when it overdescribes or otherwise gets in the way of communicating the scene it becomes unnecessary and distracting.
Passive voice isn’t, despite claims to the contrary, always wrong, either. It does serve to distance the reader (and in the case of a first person or omniscient third person narrative, the narrator) from the action, but that’s not always wrong. (Witness The Lovely Bones, in which passive voice is the most common grammatical perspective.) It is also appropriate is many technical reports as a way of seperating the user from the action undertaken. (Reading a technical report or journal submission awkwardly written in active voice by an ill-advised novice is just painful.)
In general, though, adjectives should be used only when necessary to explicitly describe or emphasize an essential feature or action, and adverbs should be used very sparingly; this is particularly true in fiction prose where much of bad genre writing consists of such ugly, egregious misuse of adverbs. Compare the Chronicles of Narnia–which are, regardless of the reader’s opinion of the subtext, well written with succinct discriptions of action and characters–with, say, the writings of Terry Brooks, and it becomes immediately evident why the former are such classic tales and the latter is entirely disposable in terms of both content and prose.
In general, prose should be efficient and spare, which is not to say it cannot be complex at the same time; witness the great Russian writers (Chekov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, et cetera) who combined spartan prose with rich subtext and often sprawling, complex stories. The best technique, ultimately, is that which works in conveying the writer’s intent; with Wodehouse, it is a whimsical and totally unnecessary articulation of the language to meander around to an eventual and usually inconsequential point (just like his stories). With Jim Thompson, it’s a stark gut-shot bluntness that dispenses with any verbage that isn’t absolutely necessary (including, on occasion, articles and prepositions.)
Stranger
Should writers avoid adverbs? Maybe, but don’t tell that to Daniel Handler.