“Kill your adjectives and adverbs. Use the right nouns and verbs instead.”
Sound advice. Some editors can be draconian about this, particularly those with Hemmingway leanings. It’s true, pared down action has greater impact and is more immediate than discursive meandering.
But what if we really used the same technique for all writing? Think of an entire book where even the nouns and adjectives are press-ganged into working as verbs throughout, like Cormac McCarthys The Road. Relentless. It’s exhausting, like being awake for 48 hours. No-one’s saying it’s bad, but woah, intense.
Of course, people realise this. Not many in their right mind would try to put together a piece describing a peaceful woodland setting in this style. It’s not only the adjectives and adverbs that act as a slow-down mechanism (I’m not talking about allowing sloppy writing here). Varied sentence structure, an idiosyncratic and imaginative lexicon, striking imagery – all of these put brakes on the reader and make time on the page pass slower. Which is not always a bad thing.
On the other hand writing a battle scene in a discursive style would also be a mistake.
It’s interesting to note how deep these principles go and how cross-lingual the applications are. Listen to a news report, translated from any language you like, of survivor accounts of (say) a shelling. “We hid under the stairs. It was dark. I ran. My mother was killed.” Under stress all languages are pared down to their most basic components. These people will never use long sentences to describe their recent ordeals.
Now think of long-sentence users. Politicians employ rhythmic, lengthy sentences stuffed with fillers to obfuscate and mis-direct. Orators use balanced constructs of varied structure to persuade and inspire authority. Writers use ‘slow’ constructs to direct the tempo of their readers’ pulses.
So next time you go on the editing adjective-cull, consider your victim's real function before the slaughter.