![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
While lovingly revising my novel, rigorously revised in moments callously stolen from heavily weighing responsibilities, I belatedly and shockingly discovered a previously suspected but not fully understood adverb addiction of dismayingly grave proportions.
Ahem. The prosecution rests.
"Why not try to kill off a few of those pesky adverbs and adverbial phrases?" I wondered. So I sat down with the search tools in InDesign and looked for all words that ended in -ly. I figured it would only take a few minutes, since I'd already read through the full manuscript and been basically satisfied. You can imagine my dismay when I found myself deleting between one and six completely useless adverbs per page. That doesn't even include a dozen or two adverbial phrases that each required an additional pass through the manuscript to find with the search tools. After this preliminary cleanup, I had shortened my novel (standard paperback size) from 340 to 333 pages. In my defense, much of that comes from eliminating many one-word lines at the ends of paragraphs, but still... Crikey!
Based on the evidence at hand, it appears that as an editor of my own writing, I'm completely blind to adverbs and to appalling self-referential phrases such as "torn ungently" (the gently kind of tearing apparently being sufficiently common that I felt clarification was needed). I know where these things come from: I add the adverbs to clarify the mood or feeling during early drafts so I can pick stronger verbs or more concise ways to communicate the same meaning during subsequent drafts. What bothers me is that they somehow became invisible between drafts.
Although we generally can't see such defects in our own writing until someone points them out, we can at least use our word processor's or desktop publisher's search tools to find them once we know what to look for. Onscreen editing is a wonderful tool precisely because it can compensate for such weaknesses. Today's example comes from the revision process for my novel, but you can use similar approaches in non-fiction. The point you can generalize to all writing is that once you know what patterns to look for, you can use search tools to find the patterns even if you're blind to them.
It's a productive exercise to learn to start looking for such problems. I hope that with more practice writing, I'll become sufficiently aware of my adverb habit that such heroic measures will be less necessary in future. But when you can't rewire your brain, it's comforting to know that technology can help mitigate the problem.
Ahem. The prosecution rests.
"Why not try to kill off a few of those pesky adverbs and adverbial phrases?" I wondered. So I sat down with the search tools in InDesign and looked for all words that ended in -ly. I figured it would only take a few minutes, since I'd already read through the full manuscript and been basically satisfied. You can imagine my dismay when I found myself deleting between one and six completely useless adverbs per page. That doesn't even include a dozen or two adverbial phrases that each required an additional pass through the manuscript to find with the search tools. After this preliminary cleanup, I had shortened my novel (standard paperback size) from 340 to 333 pages. In my defense, much of that comes from eliminating many one-word lines at the ends of paragraphs, but still... Crikey!
Based on the evidence at hand, it appears that as an editor of my own writing, I'm completely blind to adverbs and to appalling self-referential phrases such as "torn ungently" (the gently kind of tearing apparently being sufficiently common that I felt clarification was needed). I know where these things come from: I add the adverbs to clarify the mood or feeling during early drafts so I can pick stronger verbs or more concise ways to communicate the same meaning during subsequent drafts. What bothers me is that they somehow became invisible between drafts.
Although we generally can't see such defects in our own writing until someone points them out, we can at least use our word processor's or desktop publisher's search tools to find them once we know what to look for. Onscreen editing is a wonderful tool precisely because it can compensate for such weaknesses. Today's example comes from the revision process for my novel, but you can use similar approaches in non-fiction. The point you can generalize to all writing is that once you know what patterns to look for, you can use search tools to find the patterns even if you're blind to them.
It's a productive exercise to learn to start looking for such problems. I hope that with more practice writing, I'll become sufficiently aware of my adverb habit that such heroic measures will be less necessary in future. But when you can't rewire your brain, it's comforting to know that technology can help mitigate the problem.