28 November 2010
John McIntyre, a copy editor at the Baltimore Sun, is one of the most insightful commentators on good language writing today. He hits another one out of the park with this post about the absurd maxim, “When you meet an adverb, kill it.” He does a close reading of a Nabokov passage that rips that maxim to shreds. Money quote:
Maxims can only carry you a little way forward. What you need to do is study why low-grade prose (easily found if you subscribe to a daily newspaper or have access to the Internet) never gets aloft, and why first-rate prose soars. That is when you will begin to get somewhere yourself.
Those who dispense style advice in bite-sized chunks really ought to read more. They will quickly see that almost all of their advice is exactly the opposite of how great writers write.
