Adjectives - Kill Your Darlings!
Last week I went to my daughter's school (she's studying first year secondary) where I met her English teacher, Miss X.
As a writer, I found myself biting my tongue as Miss X explained to me that students get extra credit for overwhelming their prose with adjectives and adverbs, and strewing their story dialogue with speech tags.
It's taken me years to get the balance right - i.e. as few adjectives and adverbs as possible in a text and as many incidents of 'said' as possible in the dialogue without it becoming monotonous.
So here's my daughter being told to pepper her work with numerous, weak adjectival occurences and to have characters expostulating, spluttering and gasping their words instead of merely saying them.
Well, when all's said and done (not 'spluttered and done' you may notice), perhaps Miss X has a point. Young people need to learn descriptive prose and a variety of ways of uttering words just to increase their vocabulary and get the mechanics of writing right. If they decide to take their writing to the next level, then that's when they can start killing their darlings.
Below are links to my two Global Short Story Competition winners, my short-listed story for the National newspaper, Abu Dhabi, and my Canterbury Tale published by Coscom Entertainment:
http://coscomentertainment.com/?p=159
http://www.globalshortstories.net/winningstoriesjuly09.pdf
http://www.globalshortstories.net/winningstoriesdec09.pdf
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/short-story-a-day-for-decisiveness
Happy writing!
As a writer, I found myself biting my tongue as Miss X explained to me that students get extra credit for overwhelming their prose with adjectives and adverbs, and strewing their story dialogue with speech tags.
It's taken me years to get the balance right - i.e. as few adjectives and adverbs as possible in a text and as many incidents of 'said' as possible in the dialogue without it becoming monotonous.
So here's my daughter being told to pepper her work with numerous, weak adjectival occurences and to have characters expostulating, spluttering and gasping their words instead of merely saying them.
Well, when all's said and done (not 'spluttered and done' you may notice), perhaps Miss X has a point. Young people need to learn descriptive prose and a variety of ways of uttering words just to increase their vocabulary and get the mechanics of writing right. If they decide to take their writing to the next level, then that's when they can start killing their darlings.
Below are links to my two Global Short Story Competition winners, my short-listed story for the National newspaper, Abu Dhabi, and my Canterbury Tale published by Coscom Entertainment:
http://coscomentertainment.com/?p=159
http://www.globalshortstories.net/winningstoriesjuly09.pdf
http://www.globalshortstories.net/winningstoriesdec09.pdf
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/short-story-a-day-for-decisiveness
Happy writing!
RSS Feed
