Wednesday, April 20, 2011

R is for the Road to hell

Stephen King cleverly tells us that the road to hell is thickly paved with adverbs, those modifiers of verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. They don't always end in -ly, although they often do. (In the previous sentence, always and often are adverbs.)

Adverbs get a bum rap, in my opinion. Like salt in our suppers and passive voice in our writing, they are essential to our language but are easily overdone.

6 comments:

nutschell said...

great analogy between adverbs and salt! love this post.
nutschell
www.thewritingnut.com

Amy Wood said...

I'm a big Stephen King fan and love his book, On Writing. He always gives good advise. You make an excellent point though about being necessary, but people overdoing it. Great post!
Thanks for stopping by my blog!
http://ifbloggingburnedcalories.blogspot.com

Sarah Allen said...

Very interesting post. I love Steven King, and I think you're right about them being like salt. A few might spice things up, but overdoing it is fatal.

Sarah Allen
(my creative writing blog)

Katie O'Sullivan said...

Adverbs as salt. Like the analogy. What about salty adverbs themselves?

J.L. Campbell said...

I'm in agreement with you. The way I see it is 'everything in moderation'. Thanks for stopping by my blog today.

Ciara said...

Well stated. Thanks for stopping by my blog. I'm a new follower from A-Z challenge.