By Geoffrey K. Pullum

The reason I wrote The Truth About English Grammar is that I’m quite sure the general principles of English sentence structure can be explained, in straightforward, modern, sensible terms, to a general readership of people who never took a course in linguistics. However, Stephen King is more pessimistic.

King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000, reissued 2010, 2020, and doubtless 2030 too) agrees that in addition to a good vocabulary ‘You’ll also want grammar on the top shelf of your toolbox’, but he adds that although he ‘thought long and hard about whether or not to include a detailed section on grammar’ in the book, he ultimately decided against it because, he reckons, ‘if you don’t know, it’s too late.’

It isn’t too late! English grammar is complex, and not always well understood, but anyone can learn the basic principles.

What is true is that you couldn’t learn them from the few pages King devotes to the subject. They are mostly nonsense. And to be charitable, that’s not entirely his fault. Most of the elementary books addressing grammar and writing are appalling. They regurgitate stuff that seems to have been passed down from generation to generation since the 18th century without going through anyone’s brain. Their definitions aren’t even vaguely sensible, and the things they assert about English are often plainly false.

Given reliance on those earlier works, he wasn’t given much to go on. Still, I found my charity wearing thin as I looked at the details of what he said about adverbs. The adverbophobia that he peddles in his book is even sillier than what is found in earlier ones.

‘The adverb is not your friend’, he stresses, in italics. It will drag you down into the fiery realm of Satan:

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I appreciate that this is comedic hyperbole, of course. I’m not a humorless idiot; I haven’t been pedantically checking King’s claims about the growth rate of Taraxacum officinale against botany texts and lawn management books. But even setting the dandelion dopiness aside, his general stance is crazed. Like drugs for children in Nancy Reagan’s view, he seems to think, the only policy statement to be made about them should be Just Say No.

King states correctly that adverbs ‘usually end in -ly’ – but notice that in order to say it he had to use an adverb, without which his statement would have been false. Plenty of the most basic adverbs don’t have the -ly ending: almost, always, fast, hard, how, however, just, long, maybe, never, often, otherwise, perhaps, quite, seldom, so, soon, still, thus, very, yet, and dozens of others.

Moreover (that’s another basic adverb!), there would be many more adverbs that don’t end in -ly if you were to follow King (and all the traditional grammar books and dictionaries) in the misguided practice of defining adverbs as ‘words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs’. That tradition misclassifies many words that are prepositions when used with a following noun phrase; it treats them as adverbs when there is no such noun phrase. That is, they call the up of He walked up the hill a preposition, but call the up of He walked up to me an adverb. We broke through the wall is recognized as having through as a preposition, but We broke through isn’t.

That misanalysis, stubbornly repeated in grammar books for centuries despite occasional pleading by overlooked scholars, can be improved dramatically: we can simply say that while some prepositions insist on a following noun phrase (e.g. at, of, despite), others are more relaxed, allowing a noun phrase without requiring it. When I talk about adverbs from now on, I will ignore words like about, across, after, around, before, down, in, out, round, through, up, etc. Those are just prepositions. (I allow occasional exceptions when there is strong evidence for an alternate word with the same spelling: in This ups the ante or We downed a quick beer, the words up and down are verbs – as shown by the -s and -ed suffixes.)

Traditional grammars also tend to use the term ‘adverb’ for phrases of various types that make a roughly similar meaning contribution. In Everything can change rapidly, the verb change is modified by the adverb rapidly, but the same effect can be achieved by a preposition phrase containing no adverb at all, as in Everything can change in a New York minute, or by a noun phrase as in Everything can change the very same day. That doesn’t make the underlined phrases adverbs. When I talk about adverbs, I mean actual bona fide adverbs, not chunks of text that can be intuitively described as qualifying the meanings of verbs or clauses.

Stephen King levels two charges against adverbs. First, he thinks it’s a terrible sin to use a verb plus an adverb when you could have used a verb that did the job on its own. He fears you might write He closed the door firmly when you could have written He slammed the door (that’s his example, but those two sentences have strikingly different meanings, so it’s a bad example).

This worry, familiar from other books on writing, is mistaken for a very simple reason: in most cases there will be no verb that could substitute for a combination of a word with an adverb modifier and still express the same meaning.

• You can’t get rid of the adverb in Potassium rapidly oxidizes in air by finding a verb that means ‘oxidizes quickly.’
• You can’t get rid of the adverb in They have tentatively agreed by finding a verb that means ‘agree on a potentially revocable basis.’
• You can’t get rid of visibly in He was visibly nervous by finding an adjective that has the meaning ‘nervous in a way that is visually detectable.’
• You can’t eliminate permanently in an adjective phrase like permanently ineligible by choosing a better adjective than ineligible, one that has the no-time-limit part of the meaning baked in.
• You can’t get rid of the adverb seldom in a sentence like He seldom wrote to her by choosing a verb that means the same as write but implies a paucity of occurrences.

The list could be continued indefinitely.

The second thing that worries King (and worried earlier books on writing, like William Zinsser’s On Writing Well) is not just that you might use verb-adverb combinations when there are shorter alternatives, but that if you are allowed them at all you will use them unnecessarily. Left to your own devices, he seems to think, you will use redundant adverbs. Redundantly. You will write She shouted loudly, as if you didn’t realize that shouting has to be loud, and so on. The implication is that you can’t be trusted to handle adverbs at all, because you’re a clueless nitwit. And the proposed remedy is a complete prohibition.

That’s a fine policy for handguns: lock them away in a gun cabinet, and don’t let young or inexperienced people near them at all. But it’s ridiculous overkill for the harmless adverb.

King is more emphatic about adverbs modifying dialog attribution verbs: ‘I insist that you use the adverb in dialog attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions . . . and not even then, if you can avoid it’ (p. 125).

Strangely, he then blocks the most obvious way of complying with his directive by saying: ‘Some writers try to evade the no-adverb rule by shooting the attribution verb full of steroids.’ He forbids dialog attribution phrases like Jekyll grated or Shayna gasped or Bill jerked out.

So on the previous page he commended slammed over closed firmly, but now he’s warning you not to look for a richer verb to replace said plus a modifying adverb. You’re damned if you obediently do and damned if you meekly don’t.

Elmore Leonard wrote a list of ‘ten rules of writing’ for The New York Times in 2001 (it may have originated earlier). Rule 3 was ‘Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue’ and Rule 4 was ‘Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”.’ He differs from King in that he provides rationales for the latter edict. First, he suggests, a descriptive adverb like ‘cheerily’ or ‘contemptuously’ will be undersirable in that it exposes the author as narrator. Second, he says an adverb ‘distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange.’

The first point seems to assume that the storyteller should remain behind a curtain, like a good wizard. Supplying descriptive adverbs like ‘threateningly’ or ‘sarcastically’ would be editorializing – emerging in a bid to control the reader’s perception of how the character spoke. But the trouble with this is that the author is constantly and inevitably present in third-person fiction, telling you who’s speaking, where they stood, what they could see, what mood they were in, whether they were holding a gun, and (like as not) what make and model of gun it was. Why should all that be fine, with the narrator only banned from clarifying the tone or intent of a character’s utterance?

The rhythm-interrupting point has an even more obvious flaw: almost anything can interrupt the rhythm of a sentence: too many relative clauses tacked onto the subject, or a clumsy subject-predicate transition, or an ill-positioned parenthetical explanatory remark, or a pronoun whose antecedent isn’t clear, or an unintentionally ludicrous jingly choice of words like ‘tugging the sagging rigging’. Sure, it’s good advice to keep an eye on the rhythm of your prose, but adverbs aren’t any more likely to interrupt rhythm than any other kind of word or phrase.

Do Stephen King and Elmore Leonard obey the rules they endorse? It’s a natural question – so natural that King foresees the possibility of it arising, and tries to head the investigator off at the pass. With disarming honesty, he says:

Is this a case of ‘Do as I say, not as I do’? The reader has a perfect right to ask the question, and I have a duty to provide an honest answer. Yes. It is. You need only look back through some of my own fiction to know that I’m just another ordinary sinner. . . I’ve spilled out my share of adverbs in my time, including some (it shames me to say it) in dialogue attribution.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

The deep puzzle that I perceive here is why a should top-flight, best-selling author (64 novels, 350 million copies sold, a slew of honors) agree that he uses certain locutions yet declare that he is wrong to have done so? Why would he judge himself a ‘sinner’, as if using adverbs was morally comparable to embezzling money from an employer or cheating on a trusting spouse?

Wouldn’t it be more rational to assume that the prose in King’s stories provides evidence of precisely what the prose of an excellent writer is like? For both King and Leonard certainly know their trade. His novels grip you by the collar and haul you along, forcing you to turn the pages and face whatever new shocks the next chapter holds.

Mark Liberman checked up on Elmore Leonard’s rule keeping in a Language Log post back in 2004. In the first few paragraphs of Cat Chaser (1982) he immediately found fast, neatly, freshly, once, half, already, almost, directly, and today.

And I checked up on King, noticing that he uses clearly, seriously, and two occurrences of usually in the very paragraph where he tells you that you shouldn’t be trusted with the keys to the adverb cabinet. In his three-page First Foreword to On Writing the adverbs are about 4 percent of the word count: almost, already, also, always, anymore, briefly, carefully, enough, ever, how, maybe, mostly, never, now, often, passionately, pretty (the adverb use, as in pretty good), quite, simply, sometimes, then, too, usually, and why – several of them used more than once.

Turning to King’s fiction, the first page of his huge (1,240-page) novel Under the Dome (2009) contains freshly, just, enough, extremely, eventually, really, and gently. About 3.4 percent of the words are adverbs, a perfectly normal proportion.

Elmore Leonard and Stephen King may write stories better than you do; but it’s not because they avoid adverbs!

They also use modifiers after dialog attribution verbs. Leonard favors phrases rather than adverb words (. . .Virgil said, spacing the words; . . .Mr. Perez said, with his soft accent), but King uses straight adverbs, in abundance. Here are just a few, from Under the Dome:

“And close the door,” Big Jim said pleasantly (page 314)

“Yes!” she said eagerly (315)

“I suppose I could use a little more,” Andrea said dully (317)

“Do her,” Georgia said excitedly (323)

“Bless you too,” Big Jim said gamely (327)

“He’s eating dinner with Jesus right this minute,” Big Jim said automatically (327)

King insists that he observes his own ban on steroidally-enhanced attribution verbs: ‘I have never fallen so low as “he grated” or “Bill jerked out,” though,’ he says (p. 127). But he’s wrong there too. Under the Dome is replete with quoted speech followed by verbs like crowed (321), hollered (323), cried (332), shrilled (332), roared (333), wheezed (334), screamed (343), demanded (343), wailed (344), wept (345), yelled (345). King uses such verbs just as freely as he uses adverbs with said. After telling you that you never should!

Alas, skilled people often have very little insight into the wellsprings of their skills. King and Leonard are brilliantly successful and highly competent writers, but they’re flat wrong when they talk about the way they deploy the grammar of English, particularly when giving voice to their adverbophobia. They don’t even look at their own works to check, because they feel that as authors they can just speak ex cathedra.

Where does their adverbophobia originate? Were there earlier influences? Yes. I put most of the blame on E. B. White, whose 1959 revised version of William Strunk’s little 1918 booklet Elements of Style (I discuss it here) added a new Chapter 5 with a section that begins: ‘Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.’ Absurd advice, which neither White nor anybody else follows. Yet instead of dismissing White’s fanciful directive, others took to repeating him. William Zinsser (On Writing Well, 1976) asserts that ‘Most adverbs are unnecessary.’ Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, in Economical Writing (3rd ed., 2019), repeats his assertion half a dozen times. She also repeats White, almost verbatim, but with a baffling parenthetical adverb: ‘write with nouns and, especially, verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs’ (p. 83; that use of ‘especially’ is particularly redundant, because every grammatical main clause in English contains a verb – you can’t write sentences without them).

My suspicion is that most writers on grammar and writing style, if given a document and told to mark all the adverbs, would not get a perfect score. People do not know as much about English grammar as they pretend to when they’re bullying you about it. (In Chapter 9 of my book I do what I can to provide a brief guide to which words the class of adverbs contains.)

Notice, I’m not in any way defending the inclusion of redundant or useless words. A writer should choose words with great care, and eschew redundancy – cela va sans dire! But while some adverbs may be redundant clutter, others are crucial to structure and meaning. Drop the two adverbs from the John Lewis department store’s slogan ‘Never knowingly undersold’ and you get ‘Undersold.’

Adverbs exist precisely for you to use whenever, on reflection, you feel they help you to say things exactly the way you want to say them. Don’t let the adverbophobes scare you away from using them. I shouldn’t have to say this, but as the author of an introductory book on grammar, I see that it is necessary.

Geoff Pullum spent most of his career as a professor of linguistics, first at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and then at the University of Edinburgh. He divides his time between Scotland and the Washington DC area. He co-authored The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language with Rodney Huddleston in 2002. His book The Truth About English Grammar appears in the UK on June 28th and in the USA on September 10th.