“WRITE with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs” is a traditional bit of style advice. The aim is to get young writers picking a few words that tell, rather than bulking out their prose in the hopes of convincing by sheer mass.

But does good writing really prefer nouns and verbs over adjectives and adverbs? Mark Liberman of the Language Log blog and the University of Pennsylvania tried a brief experiment, choosing several pieces of “good” writing (both fiction and non-fiction) and “bad” writing (such as two winners of the “Bad Writing Contest” competition and an archetypally purple novel of 1830, “Paul Clifford”, which begins with “It was a dark and stormy night”). The surprising result was that the “good” selection had relatively more verbs and adverbs, and the “bad” writing, relatively more nouns and adjectives.

How can usage-book writers have failed to notice that good writers use plenty of adverbs? One guess is that they are overlooking many: much, quite, rather and very are common adverbs, but they do not jump out as adverbs in the way that words ending with –ly do. A better piece of advice than “Don’t use adverbs” would be to consider replacing verbs that are combined with the likes of quickly, quietly, excitedly by verbs that include those meanings (race, tiptoe, rush) instead.

Why would good writers use more verbs? One reason is that if unnecessary words are reduced, the verb-percentage goes up as a mathematical necessity. Ordinary sentences require a verb, whereas they do not require any other part of speech. Imperatives need no subject (Run!), and sentence fragments can make sense without explicit subjects: Woke up. Got out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. By contrast, it is hard to write without verbs. So “use verbs” is not really good advice either, since writers have to use verbs, and trying to add extra ones would not turn out well. More.

See: The Economist

See also: Moar Verbs in the Language Log blog

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