Aspiring science-fiction authors receive one piece of advice above all others: Forsake the adverb, the killer of prose. It’s terribly, awfully, horrendously important. But why? Really, adverbs aren’t ...

Marlon James makes us wish we were back in school again, taking his classes. Marlon James, the Jamaican-born Macalester College English professor who last month won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his ...

“John quickly pulled out his gun, shakily aimed it at Joe, and angrily shot him dead.” There’s one way you might write a line of fiction (or, if you’re a member of my immediate family, memoir). Here’s ...

So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to avoid adverbs and adjectives (Zinsser 2006). Adjectives and adverbs sprinkle paper with unnecessary ...

Is there something unforgivably, infuriatingly obfuscatory about the unrestrained use of adjectives and adverbs? Many celebrated stylists think so. Crime writer Elmore Leonard, who died last week, ...

‘The’ is the most commonly used word in English. ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet and is called a pangram. Most average adult English speakers ...