When Adjectives are Necessary

December 10, 2008 · by Joanna Paterson · in

When you catch an adjective, kill it

So wrote Mark Twain, so it must be right.  Plus it’s the name of a book.  And it’s deeply quotable, so easily found on a google search for adjectives.

But… how does a quote like that help you work out when and how to make use of adjectives?  This was the question that Cath Lawson asked when I introduced the theme of simplicity:

I wonder if you can talk about adjectives.  I’m a huge fan of cutting them out but I leave some in, for fear of going too far.

If you could write about getting the balance right, that would be great.  I would really like to know about keeping things simple without going overboard.

The simplest way I could think of to answer this question was in terms of necessity.  Is your adjective needed, or  not?  What difference is it going to make?

When In Doubt Strike It Out

‘When in doubt, strike it out’ is another Twain quote, and it forms the basis of classic writing advice on adjectives (and adverbs, which some advice-givers hate even more!)  The main reason is that we tend to throw in words that aren’t doing anything useful.  They don’t serve a purpose, so they become excess words.  Clutter.  Writing flab.

Adjectives are unnecessary when they:

  • Say what the noun already conveys
  • Repeat what another adjective says (key and important decision)
  • Intensify something for effect (a really important decision)
  • Reflect a tired cliche

If anything these kind of adjectives undermine your case.  Readers become suspicious of the extra emphasis.  They’d be more persuaded by the nouns doing the job on their own.

(As a sidenote, how rigorous you are about cutting them out will depend on the context – because that will influence how your readers ‘read’ you.  You can get away with more adjectives when writing online, because it’s more like conversational speech.  We use adjectives a lot more casually when we speak.  If we edited our speech down to the clearest crispest writing style it would sound unfriendly and abrupt… so watch you don’t edit your web copy down so far it starts to sound cold.)

That doesn’t mean cut out adjectives altogether.

Going back to the original Twain quote he goes on to say this:

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.

So watch out for adjectives that are used for emphasis, that are cliched, that do the work another word’s already done and that come too thick and fast.

When Adjectives are Necessary

We can’t write without adjectives.  There’s no point cutting out a word just because it’s an adjective.  You need to decide if it’s necessary or not.

If you’re in a part of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the red dirt.  Those adjectives would do a job that the noun alone wouldn’t be doing (Zinsser)

Now that might be in a cool, dispassionate Economist style guide sense: does this word make my writing more writing more precise?

Or it might be in the telling a story sense: painting a picture, opening a window, sharing a part of your world.

When you’re doing that kind of writing the details matter – and  you can’t do detail without adjectives.

Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical.  We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese and hope we have enough money to pay for it.  At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.  We are important and our lives are important, magnficent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. (Natalie Goldberg: Writing Down the Bones)

The same principles apply when you’re recording these details: avoid over-emphasis, watch out for cliches, make your writing as specific as you can.  But don’t cut them out just for the sake of it.

To illustrate this point I went off in search of some sentences that wouldn’t work without adjectives.  Here’s one:

Daddy lies on the white wicker daybed in his blue suit pants and sleeveless undershirt and black-stockinged feet, exhausted from a long week at the bank.

It’s from Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, by Garrison Keillor

Here’s another from the same book.

It’s an outrageous sentence.  It’s ridiculously long, is packed full with adjectives (nothing sparse about their use here), and tells us a book worth of stories in one short paragraph.

On Mother’s side, I am descended from pale bookkeepers with thick glasses and soft hands and pink-cheeked Methodists who lived with utmost caution, gingerly, regretfully, in little stucco bungalows in south Minneapolis around 38th Street and 42nd Avenue and rode the old yellow streetcar to work and once a year packed a trunk and rode the Great Northern Lakeshore Limited to their summer cabin on Lake Wobegon and waded into the water up to their waists and paddled around in the shallows and fretted about wasps and the dangers of botulism and black-widow spiders and bull snakes and lightning and escaped lunatics and were grateful to return to the city and their daily routine.

Zinsser’s advice on adjectives goes like this:

Make your adjectives do work that needs to be done.

I’d agree with that.  Use necessity as your criterion for deciding whether to leave an adjective in, or to cut it out.

That doesn’t mean reducing your writing to something clinical and business like.

There are all sorts of details that need to be remembered.  All sorts of stories that need to be told.

All sorts of work to be done.

What’s your approach to adjectives: do you work them in or cut them out?
Do you have any other tips and suggestions on adjectives that you’d offer Cath?

PS If you liked this post, perhaps you’d be good enough to pass it on? Links, tweets, bookmarks, stumbles: all welcome.

Book references and style guides

The Economist Style Guide: 9th Edition

William Zinsser: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Natalie Goldberg: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Garrison Keillor: Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

Photo Credit: untitled is also an adjective by procsilas on flickr

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