A great tirade that got me thinking about my own recent antagonism toward all adverbs. In my own writing I find they show a laziness in my thinking, a desire to put a spin on my sentence because the nouns and verbs I've chosen aren't getting the job done. This may have been what one of my freshman professors was trying to show me when he directed me to read Jane Austen to understand her use of absolute constructions. That didn't help me, but over many years, reading Latin and Greek got me looking at how to use prepositional phrases, participial phrases, gerunds, and subordinate clauses to modify my sentences and verbs with greater force and precision than I would get by using an adverb.
I think you could tie your critique of adverbs into your teacher's observations about "the fact that" and "the nature of" into a generalized critique of modern educated English. Namely, that educated writers of English learn to think using nominalized concepts, where comprehending a subject involves conceiving of a bunch of concepts in a complex of spatial relationships with each other. While doing this has a lot of value for thought (e.g. modern mathematics and physics), many, many people have observed that it can produce English sentences so rudimentary that they can be unreadable.
"Fact that" and "nature of", and useless adverbs, show, in different ways, that a writer has only gone part of the way to converting their thought into readable English. "Fact" and "nature" are old philosophical concepts that have become so broad that they can be applied to anything. So a person who has translated whatever abstraction is in their minds into a clause or phrase can use the concepts to introduce that clause, without noticing that they have transformed the abstraction into a more general, and thus less powerful, concept. Limp adverbs arise when a writer specifies a nominalized concept in their thinking with an adjective, and then expands that nominalized concept into a clause with a verb. The verb is an improvement over the concept, but now the adjective is weakened into an adverb.
I only fully developed this critique in responding to your post, so I am very confident that my writing contains many of the constructions that I'm criticizing here. But it seems like a workable theory for improving my writing.
I did Latin in middle / high school and I remember it being promoted as a way of writing better English. At the time I thought "how could that statement possibly be true" but reading your comment I now think… damn! It was true. Latin did really make me better at thinking about my own use of language. (I did German in high school and Greek and French in college and now I have forgotten all four.)
I think insofar as I follow it your theory makes sense to me. People forget words have their own meanings to which they must attend, because that's not how they're trained to think of language. So instead of refining their language and becoming more exact they become verbose and vague.
Somebody I knew told me once he was told to read a novel by Jane Austen as a penance in confession—the priest said something like "your life isn't edifying. Read Jane Austen. She's edifying." I don't think that helped him much either. (I think he read Emma.)
Puppy Go Bark Bark Bark is part a series of "I Can Learn To Count" books—note, of course, that it's _I_ can learn to count, reinforcing the insidious logic of late capitalism in which to learn to count is the responsibility of the individual.…
thank you for writing a coherent (and funny!) post about what is truly one of my joker-mode triggers... perhaps because it combines two general peeves (faux historicizing and claims the writer cannot justify).
my tenth grade history teacher was sort of notorious for his feedback style, which consisted almost entirely of writing the word "why?" or "how do you know?" on your paper every time you'd made an unsupported claim or failed to connect the dots. i think this was the best writing instruction i ever received, not least of all because over the course of the year it really changed the way i thought, and i think of him often when i encounter writers who could use a few rounds with mr. c's pen, which is... a lot of them.
Is "increasingly" a common word that appears in AI written junk? Just wondering about that, especially when you said you read something that used it three times in a single paragraph.
I don't know if it is but I struck it all the time as an editor so if it does show up in AI it's probably because it shows up so much in writing… it's not one of those hallmarks of AI writing like when you see "it's not a swan song; it's a war cry" or something like that.
This, and people who write from the vantage point of 'We' as a filler for 'Me'. 'We are all addicted to our phones', 'We all want this/that obscure thing that I conveniently also want,' yada yada yada. Maybe the only good thing about reading lots of online posts that rely on We's/Increasingly's is that it's a great sign to close substack and read a proper essay or book!!
My version of this is the phrase "rooted in", as in: [broad cultural phenomenon] is rooted in [other broad cultural phenomenon]. It's usually kind of maybe true if you squint, since everything is connected in some way, but it absolves the writer of making a specific, causal claim and it tells you nothing about either phenomenon since it's so vague.
learning what the labubu was = the Moment i realized i was Old and Out of Touch Now, or maybe a Nun Now, or maybe both. anyway, i too find this Ever More Annoying and am grateful for your increasingly essential presence in my increasingly aggravating inbox
I do this way more than I probably should but a quick skim showed that half of them refer to literal crescendos of something happening in a song. The rest require a creative punishment. No adverbs for two weeks?
Yes literal crescendos are fine. Adverb diets can be useful… a long time ago I had to cut the word count on something I'd written and I lost about a thousand words just by deleting stuff like "probably" and "maybe" and "sort of." Harrowing experience.
A great tirade that got me thinking about my own recent antagonism toward all adverbs. In my own writing I find they show a laziness in my thinking, a desire to put a spin on my sentence because the nouns and verbs I've chosen aren't getting the job done. This may have been what one of my freshman professors was trying to show me when he directed me to read Jane Austen to understand her use of absolute constructions. That didn't help me, but over many years, reading Latin and Greek got me looking at how to use prepositional phrases, participial phrases, gerunds, and subordinate clauses to modify my sentences and verbs with greater force and precision than I would get by using an adverb.
I think you could tie your critique of adverbs into your teacher's observations about "the fact that" and "the nature of" into a generalized critique of modern educated English. Namely, that educated writers of English learn to think using nominalized concepts, where comprehending a subject involves conceiving of a bunch of concepts in a complex of spatial relationships with each other. While doing this has a lot of value for thought (e.g. modern mathematics and physics), many, many people have observed that it can produce English sentences so rudimentary that they can be unreadable.
"Fact that" and "nature of", and useless adverbs, show, in different ways, that a writer has only gone part of the way to converting their thought into readable English. "Fact" and "nature" are old philosophical concepts that have become so broad that they can be applied to anything. So a person who has translated whatever abstraction is in their minds into a clause or phrase can use the concepts to introduce that clause, without noticing that they have transformed the abstraction into a more general, and thus less powerful, concept. Limp adverbs arise when a writer specifies a nominalized concept in their thinking with an adjective, and then expands that nominalized concept into a clause with a verb. The verb is an improvement over the concept, but now the adjective is weakened into an adverb.
I only fully developed this critique in responding to your post, so I am very confident that my writing contains many of the constructions that I'm criticizing here. But it seems like a workable theory for improving my writing.
I did Latin in middle / high school and I remember it being promoted as a way of writing better English. At the time I thought "how could that statement possibly be true" but reading your comment I now think… damn! It was true. Latin did really make me better at thinking about my own use of language. (I did German in high school and Greek and French in college and now I have forgotten all four.)
I think insofar as I follow it your theory makes sense to me. People forget words have their own meanings to which they must attend, because that's not how they're trained to think of language. So instead of refining their language and becoming more exact they become verbose and vague.
Somebody I knew told me once he was told to read a novel by Jane Austen as a penance in confession—the priest said something like "your life isn't edifying. Read Jane Austen. She's edifying." I don't think that helped him much either. (I think he read Emma.)
your pastiches of bad cultural criticism are always so good lol
Puppy Go Bark Bark Bark is part a series of "I Can Learn To Count" books—note, of course, that it's _I_ can learn to count, reinforcing the insidious logic of late capitalism in which to learn to count is the responsibility of the individual.…
I feel you can mentally replace "increasingly" in such instances with "you're hearing it more & more" & at least make it funny.
in another era of online we would make a browser extension that does this
Lol i was literally thinking about this
thank you for writing a coherent (and funny!) post about what is truly one of my joker-mode triggers... perhaps because it combines two general peeves (faux historicizing and claims the writer cannot justify).
my tenth grade history teacher was sort of notorious for his feedback style, which consisted almost entirely of writing the word "why?" or "how do you know?" on your paper every time you'd made an unsupported claim or failed to connect the dots. i think this was the best writing instruction i ever received, not least of all because over the course of the year it really changed the way i thought, and i think of him often when i encounter writers who could use a few rounds with mr. c's pen, which is... a lot of them.
Oh that's great. That is excellent teacher feedback.
Is "increasingly" a common word that appears in AI written junk? Just wondering about that, especially when you said you read something that used it three times in a single paragraph.
I don't know if it is but I struck it all the time as an editor so if it does show up in AI it's probably because it shows up so much in writing… it's not one of those hallmarks of AI writing like when you see "it's not a swan song; it's a war cry" or something like that.
This, and people who write from the vantage point of 'We' as a filler for 'Me'. 'We are all addicted to our phones', 'We all want this/that obscure thing that I conveniently also want,' yada yada yada. Maybe the only good thing about reading lots of online posts that rely on We's/Increasingly's is that it's a great sign to close substack and read a proper essay or book!!
I have bad news for you about where I read that paragraph with the three increasinglys lol
this was my fear :/ nowhere is safe!!
My version of this is the phrase "rooted in", as in: [broad cultural phenomenon] is rooted in [other broad cultural phenomenon]. It's usually kind of maybe true if you squint, since everything is connected in some way, but it absolves the writer of making a specific, causal claim and it tells you nothing about either phenomenon since it's so vague.
Oh yes rooted in is bad and I'm more afraid to search my archives for it lol
learning what the labubu was = the Moment i realized i was Old and Out of Touch Now, or maybe a Nun Now, or maybe both. anyway, i too find this Ever More Annoying and am grateful for your increasingly essential presence in my increasingly aggravating inbox
Would we call a nun labubu Sister Labubu or something more creative like Nunubu.
i want to believe all things can be consecrated bdm. i want to believe. but
the infernu labubu
I do this way more than I probably should but a quick skim showed that half of them refer to literal crescendos of something happening in a song. The rest require a creative punishment. No adverbs for two weeks?
Yes literal crescendos are fine. Adverb diets can be useful… a long time ago I had to cut the word count on something I'd written and I lost about a thousand words just by deleting stuff like "probably" and "maybe" and "sort of." Harrowing experience.