Don’t Follow This Adverb Rule

You’d consider Jane Austen to be a good writer, wouldn’t you? Well, in the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, she commits what some bestselling authors and many, many editors consider an unforgivable sin. Can you spot it?

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

 That’s right: she used an adverb. How was the truth “acknowledged”? Why, it was acknowledged “universally.” Adverbs are those units of grammar, often ending in “ly,” that modify verbs and tell us more about what happened. Adverbs can also modify adjectives and other adverbs. As writers, we’re taught–often by people who should know better–to hate them.

The horror writer Stephen King issued perhaps the most well-known rant against adverbs. In his On Writing, King warned that, “The adverb is not your friend.” He argued that adverbs get in the way of direct, expressive writing, and he said that writers only use them because they’re afraid to write what they really mean.

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day....”

He offers an example sentence:

“He closed the door firmly.”

King asserts that the text that came before “He closed the door firmly” should tell us (or at least imply to us) how “he” closed the door, making “firmly” unnecessary.

But what about poor Jane Austen and her Pride and Prejudice? Austen's “truth” is “acknowledged” in the book’s first sentence; there is no before-text to imply how the truth was acknowledged. She’d need a strategy other than King’s to get her point across.

She could have written:

“Everyone acknowledges that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Or:

“It is a truth acknowledged by everyone in the universe, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

King might prefer one of those options, but I wouldn’t.

Fortunately for us, Jane Austen didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to use adverbs. She uses the next one just a couple of sentences later:

“‘Do not you want to know who has taken it?’ cried his wife, impatiently.”

King might argue that we should infer, from what we know of Mrs. Bennett, that she was impatient with her husband, without the help of an adverb. But we don’t really know anything about Mrs. Bennett yet, and that little adverb tells us a lot–very efficiently and very early–about her relationship with her husband.

Not every writing expert is as measured as Stephen King in their hatred of adverbs. In a recent interview, the humorist David Sedaris (you might not know who he is, but he had some bestselling books in the 1990s) said it much more forcefully:

“Hopefully there aren’t any adverbs in my book or maybe there are just one or two. But, you know, it’s the mark of an amateur. And again, there’s nothing wrong with being an amateur. That’s what you are.”

– David Sedaris

Click here to hear David Sedaris give bad advice.

So, it’s the mark of an amateur that Jane Austen used two adverbs on the first page of Pride and Prejudice. It’s an amateurish book that has, so far, sold about 20 million copies.

I’m going to take a stand here and say that you can disregard the advice of any writer who says that you should never use an adverb. King and Sedaris are laughably wrong when they say so (and, for the record, they both use adverbs now and then; Sedaris, especially, is fond of adverbial phrases and clauses).

But what about editors? I’ll take a further stand and say that a good editor will never tell you to never use an adverb. I’d hope that your editor never tells you to never do anything, but completely prohibiting a fundamental element of English grammar is inexcusable.

Of course, using adverbs clumsily or excessively can muck up your writing. But the same can be said for virtually any grammatical construct or prose technique. Using adverbs deftly and effectively, however, can make your writing your writing sharp and evocative. It’s better that I teach you how to know the difference between clumsy and deft adverb use than if I simply tell you to never use a word that ends in “ly.”

The “no adverbs” rule is easy to remember, but it will significantly limit your potential as a writer if you follow it. So, don’t.