Stephen King commented that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs”. Unfortunately, his pithiness was so effective that people often fail to notice the many exceptions he noted in later paragraphs of “On Writing”. Perhaps, therefore, it’s unfair to mention that the short prologue to King’s novel “The Stand” offers us quite a lot of paving material: “deathly pale”; “bobbed futilely”, “asked stupidly”, “extraordinarily vivid”, “coughed nervously”, “walked perfectly well”, “probably gone”, “momentarily splashing, “hunched tensely”, and “coughing steadily.” But King is not alone. In the widely read “Stein on Writing”, the publisher, editor, and writer Sol Stein went as far as to say that “most adjectives and adverbs are dispensable”.
It is certainly possible to write without using adjectives and adverbs (not so for nouns and verbs). But what are these authorities really getting at?
Both King and Stein suggest criteria for deciding whether to keep an adverb. Sol advises keeping adverbs that supply necessary information or that help to convey a precise image; Stephen’s suggestion to keep adverbs that tell readers something they would not otherwise know boils down to the same thing. Both authors give lots of examples of needless adverbs—paying special attention, like many others, to adverbs in dialogue tags (“he urged desperately”, “she whispered frantically”, “she mumbled inaudibly”, etc.).
I think that a familiar principle underlies these objections to adverbs: that is, “Show, don’t tell.” Adverbs seduce writers to tell rather than show. This, I think, is really why King writes, “What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose, which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door?”
When we write “Penelope was totally exhausted when she made it to the shore”, both the adverb and the adjective are clearly telling, rather than showing. Better, surely, to write “Penelope staggered through the shallow water and fell face-down on the sand”. One might also add that the adverb “totally” is redundant anyway, as there would be little point in saying that someone was partially exhausted.
The take-home message: rather than avoiding adverbs, if we observe the principle of “show don’t tell”, then the adverbs will look after themselves. As will the road to hell.