The Weakest Link was a British quiz show that ran on the BBC network and would have contestants answer questions on various topics for the chance to win a cash prize. Each consecutive correct answer would chain onto the current amount, and increase the value of the prize, but an incorrect answer would reset the stack to zero. At the end of each round, the contestants would get to vote one member off of the team usually the one they felt was causing them to lose the most money by answering questions incorrectly, the team's weakest link. They would leave the studio, their part in the game over as the host intoned the almost ritual words: "You are the weakest link. Goodbye."
The show's title played off the proverb that, "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link", a saying that reminds one that just as the strongest chains break if only a single link snaps, all it takes to ruin an otherwise perfect system is for one thing to go wrong. It would be overzealous perhaps to state that a novel is only as strong as its weakest paragraph, but the principle of the weakest link certainly applies in writing as much as it does in life. A google search for: "how to avoid weak writing" returns 346 000 000 results, with some of the top results being articles with headlines like "Five Weak Words That Make Your Writing Less Effective", "17 Weak Words to Avoid in Your Writing", "50 Weak Words and Phrases to Cut Out of Your Blogging", and more. It's an extensive list, but I'm sure you get the idea; if a chain loses its effectiveness because of weak links, writing loses its effectiveness because of weak words.
Some of these weakening words that feature on multiple lists across several articles are words such as "stuff", "things", "really", "very", "just", and "got". It is tempting to examine these words for fault, to understand just what it is that makes a word a pariah to the accomplished writer, but that places undue blame on the word itself. The word is not bad in and of itself, but rather in what it generally does. Certainly, there are times to use the word "almost" - it exists in the English language for a reason after all - but it is true that in almost every instance where it is deployed, there is another word that serves the writer's purposes better. In his book, "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft", novelist Stephen King states: "I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops." While it may seem as if a writer so famed for his success in the horror genre should be welcoming of any way to include a road to hell in his writing, King's stance on adverbs comes through loud and clear. He says the same thing about adverbs that our google articles do about the specific words on their lists: don't use them.
So then, what's wrong with adverbs? Well, nothing actually, In fact, King goes on to say some quite complimentary things about adverbs, likening them to dandelions that are delightful to see on a lawn, standing out a lovely and unique flower against the uniformity of grass. It is only when they consume the lawn itself and are revealed as the weeds they are that they become abhorrent. King himself makes use of adverbs and his famous novel, "The Gunslinger" features an adverb on the very first page (it's "stolidly" if you were wondering). However, King uses such words sparingly and deliberately, not relying on them as a crutch, and nor permitting them to spread and pervade his work to the point that they weaken his writing and lead to the loss of a reader's interest. Rather, by their restricted use, they stand out and serve to reinforce and highlight the sentences they feature in, strengthening King's writing as opposed to undermining it.
These writing rules then are not an outright abolition of these particular words or parts of speech, but rather an acknowledgement of their tendencies. Adverbs tend to weaken writing. The word "really" has the tendency to make a sentence weaker than it would be otherwise, but, it is not the fault of the word itself. Take the following sentences:
After he broke his arm, Shaun had to learn to brush his teeth with his left hand, something he found very difficult.
After breaking his arm, Shaun was forced to learn how to brush his teeth using his left hand, a task that proved exceptionally taxing.
By swapping out weak words and phrases such as "very difficult" and "with" the sentence loses some of its blandness and becomes more likely to keep a reader's interest. In the first sentence, "very" is a weak word. I could further edit the sentence, cutting "exceptionally" from the second version to make it shorter, more suited to a punchy, fast paced piece. Or I could alter it to read, "more taxing than he had anticipated." if I wish to give the reader further insight into what goes on in Shaun's mind.
If I have all of these options, the question becomes: which way is the right way to structure that sentence? The answer is, well, any of them. It all depends on what type of sentence I want to write, who I might be writing it for (if I were writing a children's book, for example, referring to something as "exceptionally taxing" would be well above certain age groups average literacy levels), and what sort of emotion I might be trying to evoke, among a variety of other factors. In some cases, I may even want to use the objectively "weaker" first sentence, because that is what I need at that moment.
Ultimately, memorizing a list of words to avoid is not the way to improve your writing. Cutting out every adverb is not the way to improve your writing. These steps will improve the quality of what you write, but they will not make you a better writer. One only becomes a better writer by thinking about what they write. Don't look at your writing and see if that particular features on some list on the internet, look at it and decide if that is the right word to put there. Don't address the symptoms, the words, the tendencies, address your writing, and do so in a deliberate, judicious, and intellectually-engaged manner.
Then, the quality of your writing will improve, and you will become a better writer.
Stay creating,
Michael
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