Before we get to the real reason you're here, give me a moment to remind you that the information in this article is based on my book, The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. If you're so inclined, you can  buy it at Amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores for the paltry sum of $4.99. 

Two Languages
Writers of English  have extra linguistic resources, owing to that fact that English is two utterly distinct languages more or less happily married into one language of incredible richness. When a word from one branch won’t do, we can always go looking for one belonging to the other. The trick is to know which language to employ in which circumstances.

Linguists everywhere consider English to be a Germanic language, but less than a third of today’s language actually derives from Anglo-Saxon roots, most of the rest having come to us from Latin, either directly from Roman influence or from Romantic languages such as French, a bit from Greek, even less from the Celtic language of the Britons who were running England when the Romans arrived. In a language race, the conquerors always win.

English speakers borrowed (and did not return) Latinate language from four centuries of Roman rule, a passel of early Christian missionaries, and generations of Norman French rulers. More than 10,000 additional Latin words entered the language during the Renaissance alone. In fact, Latin words continued to enter English right up through the 18th century. Any time an Anglo-Saxon word wasn’t equal to describing a new concept or thing, someone constructed a new one from Latin.

So that’s how we got here. The question for our purposes seems to be “How does having a dual language affect us as writers?”

Thanks for asking.

A Linguistic Discrepancy, or Weight Against Reach
For all that Anglo-Saxon doesn’t measure up in terms of actual numbers, most of the words it does provide are the most common in the language. Most everyday words for the common things and actions of everyday life are still based in English’s Germanic roots. One does not generally perambulate with one’s canine as often as one walks the dog. In a normal day, we are more likely to eat food than to consume or devour victuals, sustenance, or comestibles. Our language is two-thirds Latin, but our common usage is overwhelmingly rumpled old Anglo-Saxon, dressed in faded jeans and moccasins (no socks). When Latin comes out to play, it does so wearing its best clothes.

Keep it Simple
For the purposes of ordinary, everyday fiction writing, and even most nonfiction writing, the plainest flavor of English is almost always the most unnoticeable and unnoticed, and writing that doesn’t call attention to itself for its own sake is writing that communicates its intentions clearly. When it’s time to make a reader see, hear, taste, smell, or feel something, the language needs to get out of its own way, and that happens when you keep it simple.

It’s usually better to say

• Used than Utilized
  
• Started than Initiated
  
• Before than Prior to
  
• So far than As of yet
  
• But than However
  
• Rest than Remainder
  
• Found than Discovered
  
• Happened than Occurred 

Not all of those pairs involve Latinate English vs. Anglo-Saxon, but they do concern wordy and elaborate vs. clear and unadorned language. The  more decorative word or phrase will be needed far more rarely and usually when you’re looking for a more formal style, deliberately distancing the reader from the narrative, or making your language sound educated, self-important, unemotional, or wordy. That’s what Latin-based English does best.

Language and Pacing
The type of language you use helps to set the pace of your writing. Longer words, which are most often of Latin origin, help slow pace down by removing the reader from the immediacy afforded by more direct language. Shorter words, most often Anglo-Saxon derived, help speed it up. This is also true of dialog; when their feet are to the fire, characters tend to use the shortest, punchiest way to say anything. If you choose to have them do otherwise, do so deliberately and for good reasons.

Choose and Use
Speaking very generally, Latinate English is cool, erudite, perceived as higher in status and educational level, emotionally muted, and detached. Anglo-Saxon English is warm, down-to-earth, perceived as lower in status and educational level, and emotionally present. In real life, we tend to switch to Latinate English when we want to distance ourselves from the listener or establish higher status, and to shade over into Anglo-Saxon vocabulary when we’re going for closeness or establishing ourselves as "just one of the folks."

Most English speakers know unconsciously how to modulate their usage of Latin-based vs. Anglo-Saxon words depending on situation and context. We go back and forth between one and the other dozens of times every day, but most of us have never given the distinction a lot of conscious thought. Knowing about our two languages gives us a powerful tool for flexible and effective writing.

TL;DR
Rule of thumb: Anglo-Saxon English is informal, direct, close. Latinate words are the opposite.

Prefer use over utilize, start over initiate, happened over occurred, before over prior to. 

Keep it simple except when you don't. And when you don’t, know why you didn’t.

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazingPulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

The information in this article is based on my book, The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, which you can  buy at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores for the paltry sum of $4.99. You know you want to....

Pacing
No story is all action or all leisurely contemplation—or at least none worth reading. It’s vital to keep your story moving forward, but not relentlessly and not always at speed. Likewise, you must allow your characters to stop and think, but not to the point of putting your reader to sleep. A book that consisted of nothing but gunfights and car chases might be fast-paced but would soon become as boring to read as one where characters sipped tea and chatted about literature for 300 pages. People in fiction, like people in the real world, don’t always live life at the same speed, and readers need a break from both too much laid-back navel gazing and too much break-neck action.

There are two easy ways to check up on your pacing as you edit yourself.

Sentence Length
Count the words in a few dozen sentences from different parts of your work. Do they vary in length? Sentence length variety does at least two good things: it changes up the rhythm of your writing, and it helps control the pace.

Count the words in the sentences of an action or dialogue sequence, and do the same for a more leisurely part of your story. Which part had shorter sentences overall, and which longer? If there wasn’t much difference, you might need to work on tightening up the pace of your faster-moving scenes.

Long sentences tend to slow the pace of a story. There are times when you want to do this, particularly just before or just after a sequence of fast-paced action. In a slow-paced scene, sentences can lengthen out just a bit. Think of it like a heartbeat. When everything’s peaceful, the story’s heart rate can be slow and easy until the next action moment.

   Thomas watched the gulls wheel in the gray sky above the gray water, always seeming to be on the lookout for whatever might be down there just below the surface. He threw the last of his stones into an incoming wave and walked back up the shore toward Lena’s place, more than half hoping no-one would be home yet.

Average length of a sentence: 29.5 words.

When the action picks up, so does the heartbeat. Pick up the pace of narrative with shorter, punchier sentences that contain less observation and reflection and more action and/or dialog. 

   Two figures resolved out of the mist. Thomas dropped behind a sandbar, heart hammering. It was Dexter and Clarke. Lena’s mother must have told them where he’d be.

Average length of a sentence: 7 words.

Dialogue is a form of action, and one that can move a story forward rapidly.

   “Those two could have killed me. If they’d seen me, they would have.”
   Mrs. Flores wrung her hands in the dish towel. “I didn’t tell them anything!”
   “You’re the only one who could have!”
   “No, Thomas, I never talked to them. I swear!”
   “Leave her alone, Thomas,” Lena said. “She didn’t tell Dexter and Clarke where to find you.”
   “Then who?”
   “I did.”

Average length of a sentence: 5 words.

Let the length of your sentences help create the pace of your narrative and signal the reader how much forward movement to expect as soon as they see the page.

Paragraph Length
Alternating the length and action content of your paragraphs is a good way to slow down and speed up pacing. Long paragraphs slow the pace. This can be a good thing in moderation, but when a reader sees lots of lengthy paragraphs ahead, she may begin to skim. This is a slippery slope that might end with her putting down your book and forgetting to pick it up again. 

Conversely, short paragraphs, including dialog, tell the reader that the pace is picking up, along with the information-to-words ratio. 

When reading drags, break up long paragraphs into two or more. Use dialog and other short action paragraphs to slow down reading speed and perk up reader attention.

Masterful Pacing
Pace is also determined by content, so if your sentence and paragraph length matches the pace you’re hoping to set with your words, you won’t be working against yourself in that regard. It can be useful, however, to go against the reader’s expectations for pace. Let me give you an example of how a master does it.

Near the end of Everybody Dies, one of the Matt Scudder novels, Lawrence Block puts two well-loved characters in an unbearably tense situation. As they walk across the countryside into what they know is a trap to face an unknown number of well-armed men, the reader knows that one man is here out of loyalty to the other, who has foreseen his own death. In point of fact, both are far more likely to die violently and soon than to live past the next few minutes. Many authors would have made sure to speed up the pacing to keep the reader glued to the page, but Block has another way of snagging hearts and minds; he uses the time it takes them to walk to their fatal rendezvous to have one of the characters talk about life, his past, his philosophy, his beliefs. With every paragraph that delays the coming shoot-out, the reader is gripped by apprehension and anticipated grief. When the deadly shoot-out finally happens, it’s almost a relief to have the waiting over with.

Where Block could have sped the reader on to the final confrontation by upping the pace, he made the tension unbearable by slowing it. Where he could have written a perfectly fine chapter, he wrote a masterful one. Pace is but another of the little toys excellent writers like Lawrence Block use to keep readers buying and reading and anticipating books.

Chances are you'll fall naturally into keeping sentences and paragraphs at the proper length for the pace of your scenes, but if a scene isn't working, it may be worth reading to see whether or not the pace you need matches the pace you've written. I'll talk about how language choices affect pacing and other aspects of your writing in next week's article, "Two Languages."

TL;DR
Sentence and paragraph length directly affect story pacing. In general, they get shorter as the action speeds up, longer as it slows down.

Reading pace is to some degree the opposite. As pace picks up, reading rate slows down. As pace drops, reading speeds up.

Vary the length of paragraphs in slower-paced sections to keep readers’ eyes from glazing over.

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

Welcome to Part 5 of Self-Editing for Everyone, based on all that editorial advice you can't live without but can find in the pages of The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. For $4.99 or the local equivalent, you can buy the e-book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores on planet Earth. Now back to today's regularly scheduled program.


Superfluous Redundancy
A lot of editorial red ink goes into the task of showing new writers what they’re saying that they don’t need to say. I call this problem “superfluous redundancy.” Don't bother to write me; it's a joke. But the problem is not. When a writer is hesitant and unsure how to proceed, he will almost always err on the side of too much explanation, too much justification, too many words. And those words get in the way of the story.

This might be a good place to bring up what a beloved writing teacher, Algis Budrys, told me one day almost 30 years ago:

“The manuscript is not the story.”

It took me a minute to get that the first time I heard it, so I’m gonna say it again: The manuscript is not the story. The manuscript is where we put down the words we’re using to tell the story; it is not the story itself. Often, Algis told me, we say “I’m working on my story” when what we mean is “I’m making changes to my manuscript.” Sometimes the manuscript gets in the way of the story, and if you know the difference between the two it’s easier to remove words that aren’t pulling their weight to allow your story to emerge from your manuscript. Making that distinction allows writers to understand what a good editor does for them, and why making suggestions for revisions to the manuscript does not necessarily threaten the story.

Why I Cut Stuff
There are a lot of reasons an editor might suggest text cuts, but you’d be surprised how much of the reasoning boils down to cutting repetition, and repetition usually takes one or more of the following forms:

The information in the cut portion has been stated before or after the cut, and the deleted words are the weakest or otherwise unnecessary version of the two. Cut portions will appear in red.

A spray of bullets erupted from the wall of smoke. They spat out from the middle of the cloud.

The information is strongly implied by something you’ve written before or after the cut, and it’s not necessary to state it outright.

Curtains moved aside in one of the top-floor windows.  Someone was watching.

The information is obvious from context.

“Do it now!” he commanded.

The information is obvious because of point of view.

Kelly watched as tThe dog turned and trotted away.

There’s a shorter, clearer, and/or more impactful way of saying it.

(Insert any long-winded, filler-heavy sentence from your own early draft here.)

The Cranky Editor 
Below are excerpts from editing comments I’ve made to authors I’ve worked with in the past. In every case, I’ve changed the wording to avoid identification, while leaving the problems intact. My comments appear in green.

She did not respond.

The reader is watching this happen, so if she doesn’t speak, we don’t have to be told she didn’t. 

“I’ll be back in an hour.” With that, he left.

Ten points from Hufflepuff for the fish head (See Part 4: The Weakeners) “With that.” Another ten for telling us he left instead of showing him leaving, or just letting his words speak for him and transitioning to what happens next.

Martin brushed past without acknowledging the man or his outstretched hand.

If Martin walked on and nowhere in the narrative did he acknowledge the man, that fact is evident to the reader. The reader doesn’t need to be told that he didn’t.

He had no idea where he was, or even who he was. He had no memory of his past.

You said it, then you said it again.  The second telling weakens the first one. “…who he was” is the strongest place you can exit this sentence. If you like, you can then show him going for a memory and coming up dry rather than telling the reader he can’t remember.

Then she asked a question: “Why would you do that to me?”

Since you show her asking the question, you don’t need to tell the reader that she asked it.

“The car stopped and turned around in the road, spinning its tires. He suddenly realized that i It was coming back this way.”

He realized it because he saw what happened. So did the reader.

His attention was drawn to the wolf. The wolf lowered its head and snarled.

We saw the wolf as soon as the POV character did. We don’t need to be reminded that it’s there. The second sentence shows the wolf in action. That's what you want.

He almost asked her if she’d lied to him, but then he decided she’d only clam up.

We’re reading his thoughts; we don’t need to be told that he decided it.

Jase looked at both of them.

If there are two other people in the room, and Jase looked at them, he looked at them both.

He sank back against the wall, then slid down to sit against it, head down, breathing shallowly. He did not struggle.

Not only is that evident from the description of his actions that the character wasn’t struggling, but you're telling the reader what didn’t happen. 

Never waste your reader’s time describing what doesn’t happen.

“As you know…”
There are few rules in writing that are absolute. Here’s one that just might be: never, ever say “as you know.” Never say anything that even smacks of it, like “as I told you already,” “as you heard from Joe,” or “as we’ve already covered in a previous discussion.” This is a type of info dump also called an “As you know, Bob…” (AYKB)—a weak method of using dialogue to cover ground that you suspect should have already been covered offstage, or in a previous scene you decided not to write. 

Characters do have conversations while readers aren’t listening, so they sometimes refer to things in the context of previous knowledge, just as flesh-and-blood people do. But the difference is that the fictional ones never say “as you know.”

There are ways to show information was received previously:

• “I warned you that might happen…”
  


• His mother had warned him about Sasha more than once, but as usual he hadn’t listened.
  


•  “You always used to tell me he couldn’t be trusted.”
  

Spare Parts
Your reader probably has a pretty good idea which body parts are involved in which sensory experiences, so you don’t need to say:

She tasted ___ in her mouth.

That’s where she’d taste anything.


The same goes for all activity and body part pairs:

He punched the guy with his fist.

I kicked the tire with my foot.

By the same token:

He remembered hearing about Lorna in the past.

If a character remembers something, the reader already knows it’s in the past. Even more direct:

He’d heard about Lorna.

Hesitant, unsure writing leads to the desire to spell out things that your reader can understand from context.  It puffs up your manuscript with useless words that don’t serve the purposes of your story. Learning your own hesitant writing habits will help you to correct early-draft repetition and avoid the curse of superfluous redundancy.

TL;DR

Overexplaining causes repetition that bloats your sentences and blunts your writing. 

Eliminate repetitive information to give your reader a clear and direct experience of your story. 

Never use any form of “As you know,” “As I already explained,” “As you heard from that other character,” not even if threatened with lethal weapons.

Have you avoided saying what was evident, obvious, or actually stated elsewhere in a different way? 

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

“Vigorous writing is precise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
—William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style

Filler Words, Fish Heads, and More 
I don’t carry a copy of The Elements of Style close to my heart, and I haven’t thought it was the definitive usage manual for nearly half my life, but old Professor Strunk really hit the nail on the head for me with the statement above. If those words could be tattooed on the living brain of every writer, editors would have a lot less work to do. That’s why I chose it as the opening quote in The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. Since I haven't mentioned it in a whole week, I'd just like to point out that for the negligible price of $4.99, you can buy the e-book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores. Thank you.

Writers love words, and they often use too many of them when fewer would serve their writing better. The earlier in her writing career, the more likely a writer is to add words to explain things that don’t need explaining, to add adverbs when no adverb is called for, to add pet words that are so close to her heart that she doesn’t see them in her manuscript, and to add words that not only don’t move her sentences and paragraphs along, but tie them up and stake them out in the sun. We’re all prone to these same errors from time to time, but once we’ve learned what they are and why we make them, we can use that learning to grow as writers.

I’ll cover some of these errors—in particular those related to over-explaining and other forms of repetition—in Part 5: When Words Get in the Way. For this article I’ll focus on filler words, fish heads (and tails), nominalizations, and a common word that may be making your writing sound common.

Fish Heads
Have you ever used “suddenly” or “just then” to convey a feeling of urgency to the beginning of a sentence? It doesn’t. Adding unnecessary words before the action of a sentence begins slows it down, and your writing along with it.

For instance, which version of each sentence below seems more immediate (or “sudden”)?

A car screamed around the corner and fishtailed toward her.

Suddenly, a car screamed around the corner and fishtailed toward her.
--
Bobby dove for the gun.

Just then, Bobby dove for the gun.

It’s the first example every time; it gets right to what’s happening and engages the reader without author interference.

In addition to “just then” and “suddenly,” a lot of other unnecessary words and phrases like to cluster at the beginning of a sentence, as though trying to get it up to speed before it leaves the ground, and weighing it down instead. These are fish heads—the part you cut off.

The words in the list below, and words like them, may be bloating your writing. You can make a case for any of them having its place, but that place is almost never at the beginning of a sentence that can get off the dime more effectively without their added weight. When not occurring at the beginning as fish heads, you may find words like these in the middle as filler words and at the end as fish tails. In all cases, consider carefully whether they're useful to conveying a direct sensory experience to your reader, or whether they're just excess baggage.

Fish Tails
Many of the items in the above lists can also flop around on the ends of sentences. When you find a word or phrase that might be a fish tail, follow back to the word or phrase that precedes it, and see if the sentence wouldn’t be better ended there. Whenever possible, a sentence should end on the strongest idea, the strongest word—the place you want to make an effect on the reader. If any of yours do not, either rearrange the words or chop off any fish tails that follow a strong natural ending.

The most egregious fish tails of all occur when the writer feels uncertain about how well he’s shown a thing and adds unnecessary words to explain it. The examples below may seem exaggerated, but they’re taken from manuscripts and published books. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

“No way,” Larry said in denial.

“I’d love to!” Beth told him, showing her joy.

“Do it now!” Franz shouted in a yelling voice.

Filler Words
In addition to fish heads and tails, we may unconsciously add other fillers to our writing. “Just,” “that” and “then” are prime examples; they’re good words in moderation, but we can become habituated to them.

This is by no means a complete list, and you’ll probably find more examples to add from your own first drafts, as I have. I’m not saying every instance of all of these words and phrases will be unnecessary, but if you take the time to search for each of them and notice where and how you use them, I think you’ll find lots of places where they crept in unneeded. If you ask your word-processing program to count them for you, you might just be horrified.

Nominalizations
“Nominalization” is a nominalization – a verb made into a pseudo-noun, such as “rectification” or “organization” as opposed to a concrete noun—an actual person, place, or thing. Nominalizations convey little meaning while sounding utterly important, which is why they crop up so often in political speeches: they suggest a wide range of different things to different people and give a general feeling of usefulness (and extra syllables) without actually doing much of anything. Using them in place of concrete nouns or real verbs can make your writing sound like a corporate memo. You can’t avoid them altogether, but keep your eye out for them and try to rephrase where possible.

Helen Sword, in her excellent New York Times article on the subject, calls nominalizations “zombie nouns” ‘...because they cannibalize active verbs’ and ‘suck the lifeblood from adjectives.’ A woman after my own heart.

Not all nominalizations end with –tion, but that’s a place to start looking for them, and is easily searched. Words ending in –ship and -ence also sound solid and meaningful, but may freeze-dry otherwise free-flowing prose. 

Of course if you want to make a character sound like a corporate memo, then nominalization becomes a potent tool. But watch for it creeping into other characters’ dialogue, or into the narrative. Use a concrete noun, or change the sentence to accommodate a dynamic verb. Keep your prose moving.

The “ongoing” test: a word is probably a nominalization if you can put the word “ongoing” in front of it and make sense. If you can’t, it probably isn’t. You’ll never see an “ongoing fruit fly,” but you might be part of an “ongoing investigation.” “Ongoing urbanization” might disturb you, but you needn’t lose any sleep over “ongoing armchairs.”

The “wheelbarrow” test: If you can put it in a wheelbarrow, however large, it’s a concrete noun. You can put cats in a wheelbarrow—carefully—but not “classification” or “relationships.”

Consider the following examples of commonly used nominalizations followed by the same idea rewritten to return them to their verb state. 

Willy gave the matter further consideration.

Willy considered the matter further.
--
Miller made an accusation of slander against Norden.

Miller accused Norden of slander.
--
It only served as an illustration of my problem.

It only served to illustrate my problem.

Replace nominalizations and put the wheels back on your writing.

The Word That Wasn’t There
We tend to use the word “some” when the quantity or other specifics about a thing are unknown.

Lester expected to come away from the chicken coop with some eggs.

Ehrdrich would be bringing some muscle with him.

As such, it’s not incorrect as much as unnecessary; the sentences below convey the same information.

Lester expected to come away from the chicken coop with eggs.

Ehrdrich would be bringing muscle with him.

So whether or not to use “some” in a case like this is largely down to how you feel about what it’s contributing—or not—to the meaning and the sentence’s rhythm.

Sometimes the quantity in “some” is knowable but not important.

Louise brought some chicken to the picnic.

I added some sugar to my coffee.

…but it still has that “filler” quality. The sentences read a little cleaner without it.

Louise brought chicken to the picnic.

I added sugar to my coffee.

“Some” performs a useful job when a sense of mystery is required, and we’re not quite ready to reveal our specifics…

Something skittered in the underbrush.

Something nibbled at the back of her mind.

Someone was coming.

…but not so much when we need to paint the reader a picture.

Giannino arrived with some soldiers.

(And along the same lines:)

Giannino arrived with a group of soldiers. 

Some? How many? What does “some” or “a group” look like in a reader’s mind?

Giannino arrived with a platoon of soldiers.

…with a company of soldiers.

… with a battalion of soldiers.

… with three soldiers.

Specifics paint a picture. “Some” does not.  In sighted people, more than 2/3 of brain real estate is given over to aspects of the visual, including imagining pictures. Painting a picture for the reader is good.

Go looking for weakeners in your manuscripts. Find them, then kill them. The cranky editor does not advise showing mercy to the enemies of your writing.

You can download a copy of the Self-Editing Quick Reference, an excerpt from The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers, at the Ravenscourt Press website.

TL;DR
Are you slowing down your sentences with unnecessary words at the beginning? Fish heads. Chop ‘em.

Are your sentences trailing on after they've done their work? Fish tails. Bin ‘em.

Is your writing free of superfluous filler phrases: as you know, looked like, ended up being, etc? See above.

Be sure to tune in next week for Self-Editing for Everyone Part 5: When Words Get in the Way, where I'll offer up more about what weakens your writing.

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.

Welcome to Part 3 of Self-Editing for Everyone, based on all that super-useful stuff in The Little Book of Self-Editing for Writers. This time we'll be focusing on the dreaded adverb, but if you want to cut to the chase you can buy the e-book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and all Amazon stores.

Attack of the Adverbs!
My former students and editing clients probably won’t believe I said this, but an adverb is a useful and necessary part of speech. It does a job. It just doesn’t do the job a lot of writers seem to think it does—that of somehow making up for having chosen a flabby verb.

Adverbs modify verbs or adjectives. That's their job. When used wisely and in moderation, they help convey meaning, and they can improve a non-specific sort of verb by giving the reader more information.
  
Adverbs modifying verbs
Bob read voraciously in all genres.
Jax placed the eggs carefully into the basket.

Adverbs modifying adjectives
Merkel’s frostily pale eyes scanned the restaurant.
“Lightly sautéed works best for mushrooms,” Bashir assured her.

That said, when a strong, specific verb is called for, an adverb is not.

My position may sound extreme to you, but I believe you can delete, without tears, most examples of adverbs modifying verbs; a robust verb standing alone is always stronger than a weak verb leaning on an adverb. Inexperienced writers tend think adverbs will shore up weak verbs and make their meaning clearer. In fact, adverbs only trick you into thinking they’re supporting a weak verb; what they’re actually doing is kicking its skinny little legs out from under it.

“Sprinted” is stronger than “ran quickly,” “smashed” tells us more than “hit hard,” “shrieked” is more evocative than “cried loudly.” You get the idea. A good verb shows rather than tells, strengthening—and tightening—the sentence while conveying maximum information and emotion to the reader.

Adverbs modifying adjectives are usually far less of a problem in writing. If you have a tendency to overuse them, you’ll soon figure it out when you search your manuscript for “ly.” While you’re at it, you’ll probably find a lot of verb-modifying adverbs that wormed their way into your sentences without you having been aware of them. Kill them and rewrite to favor good healthy verbs.

Not all adverbs end in “-ly,” but many do. It’s a good place to start when searching your manuscript.

“Very” is a very sneaky adverb—one that tries to fool you into thinking it improves an adjective. For instance, the second “very” in the preceding sentence could be eliminated without losing meaning. And it should be. It makes me itch just looking at it.

A good adjective can walk on its own two legs most of the time, or it can partner with another adjective or a more meaningful adverb to further describe the noun in question. Or you can just back up and re-describe the noun in other terms.

“Very” can almost always be cut from narrative as well as most dialogue. See also “absolutely, definitely, mostly, simply, really, totally, terribly, utterly,” and any word, really, that stands in the way of a simple, well-chosen modifier trying to do its job.

“A very tall man” is rarely as good as... 

...a tall, slender man (two adjectives doing their job without the intervention of an adverb).
...a freakishly tall man (an adverb doing yeoman duty. Well done, adverb!).
...a man so tall his head threatened the door lintel (bringing the POV character’s reaction into play).

Or just make the man’s height part of the action:

She looked up and up and up, and the man just kept on going.

“Very” is not only sneaky, it’s lazy. There’s almost always another word that will do more work for the same pay.

TL;DR
How many of your verbs are weaklings hoping in vain for help from an adverb? How many are already perfectly good verbs that can stand on their own without an adverb?

How many times have you used these and similar words?

Very, Absolutely, Definitely, Mostly, Simply, Really, Totally, Terribly, Completely, Utterly... 

• Search for “ly.”
  
• Eliminate unnecessary adverbs.
  
• Replace weak verbs with strong, specific ones that convey more meaning.
  

COVER ART
All the fabulous pulp magazine covers on this article series were created using the amazing Pulp-O-Mizer from art by its creator, Bradley W. Schenck.