Rich Language looks at Justify Your Adjectives

Justify Your Adjectives

Most professional writers say you need to show rather than tell. The oft-repeated maxim of "avoid adjectives" has been repeated enough to become a cliché. However, as Geoffrey Pullum explains in this article at Language Log, this advice makes no sense on its own. As with my theory on editing, my theory on adjectives is that you need to justify them, rather than strike them outright.

Showing, rather than telling, usually involves a significant reduction in the use of adjectives and adverbs, and a more creative use of verbs on their own. Rather than saying: "She had a giant belly, her portly hips could barely make it through the door." Instead you could say: "Her belly squirmed as she negotiated her bulk through the doorway." "giant" and "portly" make way to "squirmed" and "negotiated".

I like to view verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the same way I view protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Filling your diet with a significant percentages of any of these items alone will be bad for you, and bad for your writing. What you need to do is come up with a healthy mix, and as with your diet, your choice will depend on your writing lifestyle and the sort of things you write.

In academic or business writing, it makes sense to show data or demonstrate a cause and effect before passing comment, so you'll tend to use a lot of verbs when reporting your findings, but then use a lot of adjectives when delivering opinion or building up your own opinions on the data.

In creative writing, on the other hand, you will want to cut down on your adjective and adverb intake, and replace it with descriptive verbs that get your reader thinking. Trimming adjectives also helps your reader fill in the gaps by themselves. There's nothing worse than reading an overdescriptive piece of creative writing that doesn't let you imagine and experience things in your own way!

Take this excerpt:

Bill stepped out to look at the new car Joe had just pulled up in. It was shining, its metallic blue paint sparkling and glinting in the hot afternoon sun like a freshly cut diamond.

There are quite a few adjectives here. freshly cut, metallic, blue, new and hot help put a picture in the reader's mind, but waste time and make the text slow and cumbersome to read. This isn't good writing. We can fix this like so:

Bill stepped outside to see Joe's car pull up at the kerb. Its paint sparkled in the afternoon sun.

We've gone from 35 to 19 words. Almost half! When we're told that the paint "sparkled in the afternoon sun", our mind's eye can still see a shiny car. Does it matter than it has metallic paint or that it's blue? If the story depends on the car being blue, we can that in, but we'll have justified it. It may be that the story only requires the color to be known later, in which case omitting the color may prove to be an effective storyteller's tool.

Adjectives tend to make up the bulk of the diet in short articles or opinion pieces, where there isn't time to show things in detail, and a personal view of a subject or opinion is acceptable. RichLanguage articles, for example, would come under this definition.

The Adjective Checklist

If an adjective can make it through this checklist, let it live:

• Is it qualified? Does it really make sense?
• Does it redefine or radically affect the noun? We know that whales are big, don't tell us! We know that car mechanics have greasy hands, don't tell us! However, a professional driver is significantly different to just "a driver"!
• Does it add anything to the reader's knowledge? If we already know the car is new somehow, we don't need to be hit over the head with the point.
• Is it in a non-clichéd usage?
• Is it unique? (not constantly used against the same noun)

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