I love adjectives too much they have given me writing arthritis.

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I couldn't think of good suggestions so I googled. The results were total crap and/or not useful. Example...

    Best bet: Kill your adjectives and choose strong nouns.

    [...]

    Kill your adjectives for practice. Try this.

    Choose a page or two from a rough draft or a completed short story or novel. This applies to non-fiction, too, if you tend to overuse adjectives. Save it as a separate doc or duplicate and kill your adjectives. What’s left? Is your meaning clear in all cases?

    If removing adjectives means readers won’t know what you mean, replace nouns with stronger choices. You might need to add a few descriptive adjectives for clarity in some cases, but with fewer adjectives, you should end up with much better writing.

    It's not bad advice but the article didn't explain how. So much stuff on the net about writing is some horrid combo of copypasta and attempts at SEO gaming.

    I suggest you join a forum somewhere that people share their writing to be criticized. Before you share your own stuff - you could do searches for stuff like "How do I use fewer adjectives". Even a small, active forum should have at least a few times if the forum is any good.

    I might be wrong but I'd stay away from sites like reddit where the vast majority of people have dreams but are unwilling to do anything to even improve a tiny bit. They are always searching for just the right post or comment to learn how they can write a bestselling, critically acclaimed novel in a month. If not three weeks.