'Long Live the Adjective!'

I’ve been informally coaching another writer in the engineering school. She’s young, smart, inexperienced and willing to learn, and already writes better than most of the writers employed by the university. Given the state of public education, that’s a minor miracle. Our arrangement started as copy editing, simply typo-catching and tightening. We rely on A.P. style, fine-tuned for the quirks of the school, and she has slowly internalized most of its lessons. Academics like to capitalize everything. We stifle that. 

Then we came to adjectives. Too many writers take the cosmetic approach to this part of speech. They compose an updated form of Homeric epithets: Every award is “prestigious.” All research is “cutting-edge.” The difference between adjective and cliché gets blurred. Any word chosen automatically, without reflection, is likely dead on arrival.

 

In his two-page essay “Adjectives,” collected in Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (trans. Lillian Vallee, 1995), the late Adam Zagajewski defends our modifiers. He even makes their defense political:

 

“Nouns and verbs are enough for soldiers and leaders of totalitarian countries. For the adjective is the indispensable guarantor of the individuality of people and things.”

 

I like adjectives, too, when they know their place. Young writers favor adjectives because it’s easy to generate them, and to the naïve they lend a “poetic” sheen to mere prose. I remember the mercifully brief influence Thomas Wolfe had on the way I wrote as a teenager. Such writers like to appear sensitive and artful, but their adjective-dense sentences leave precisely the opposite impression. Unless your last name is Burton or Browne, it’s probably best to avoid them or use them sparingly. Again, I agree with Zagajewski, but skeptically:

 

“Long live the adjective! Small or big, forgotten or current. We need you, malleable, slim adjective that lies on objects and people so lightly and always sees to it that the vivifying taste of individuality not be lost.”

Now, let’s talk about adverbs.