yikes

[ratcreature]

I am not actually in the "adverbs and adjectives always suck" camp of stylistic advice or anything, but wow, I just tried to read a story in which the overabundance of them threw me right out. I don't think I've ever had that happen before. Not recently anyway.

I counted over twenty adjectives and adverbs in the first paragraph of six sentences with 130 words in total. And that was not including nouns being modified by other nouns in some sort of tacked on thesaurus, like if I wrote "the purple prose, this murky miasma of adjectives,..." I counted only the two adjectives, not the whole mess -- what do you call that kind of construction anyway? (The story didn't do it with alliterations though, I just did that in my example for humor, it was just two nouns, both modified with adjectives, saying the same thing, one after another.) That was even more jarring than the adjectives. The writer should just have settled on one of the two choices.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Thanks for giving the term. I suppose as everything they are okay in moderation. I mostly don't mind anything an author does as long as it doesn't jump out at me and kills my immersion into the narrative by being too noticeable.

[tazlet]

Sometimes, I think 'immersion' is the issue--the style you describe is blatantly 'old fashioned' and reading something of that nature, Dickens for instance, or even Tolkien, these days, requires time, patience and setting (a comfy sofa and a solid book) for which internet browsing is hardly ideal. But, most importantly, the author has to provide enough material of substance and be good enough to conduct you into the prose in such a manner that by the time you realize you've just read 20 adjectives and adverbs, you also feel like you've just nibbled the first layer of a great box of chocolates ;).

[ratcreature]

I love Tolkien. Unfortunately this author was not so good at it. And it did not really fit with the Star Wars vignette either...