Yep, you read that right. Kill off those adjectives. And adverbs. Stephen King once wrote “The road to hell is paved with adverbs” but he’s not saying you should never use them; the proper verb can pack enough of a punch on its own so, if you use an adverb to expand it, make sure you choose carefully.

The same applies to the adjective. According to Mark Twain, you should kill off most of your adjectives; that way, the ones left will be more valuable. When adjectives are too close to one another, they are weak; spread them apart and they are much stronger.

The Backstory

Adjectives are used or modify or describe nouns which are people, places, or things, not to mention qualities, concepts, and activities. Nouns are also verb subjects, as in this example:

The big dog growled loudly.

The adjective is “big” and the noun is “dog”. “Growled” is a verb and “dog” is the verb subject. And “loudly”, well that’s one of those hellish adverbs.

But what about the adjectives? The following are those that are used far too much:

Bad

Beautiful

Big

Bright

Dark

Good

Happy

High

Little

Long

Loud

Low

Old

Sad

Soft

Short

Tall

Ugly

Wide

Young

Along with all the basic colors, like red, green, blue, purple, etc.

While there isn’t anything wrong with these, you can overuse them and having too many of the common ones can overwhelm your writing without adding any value.

Why You Must Kill Those Adjectives

When you pair a common adjective with a common noun, things get a little bit vague and very rarely provide a reader with the image or experience you wanted to get across. Worst case, they are incredibly boring and using too many of them will only drag your writing down.

You could choose another adjective, one that is a bit more precise. Choosing the right adjective will communicate the image of a scene as you want your readers to see it. So, rather than:

The big dog growled loudly.

Try:

The enormous dog growled loudly.

Specific Nouns are Better

Instead of  “enormous dog”, you could consider stating the breed of the dog, especially if the dog plays an important part in the story and you already described the breed. You could use any large dog breed – German Shepherd, Mastiff, Saint Bernard and so on. If you need to communicate aggression, you could choose a breed such as Doberman or Rottweiler but as these really are stereotypical, it might be wiser not to.

So, other ways of writing that sentence could be:

The German Shepherd growled loudly.

If you want to show the action you could rewrite the sentence as:

An enormous dog leaped out snarling and growling.

Another example:

The old car roared off down the road.

Could be rewritten as:

The rickety car roared off down the road.

The Model T roared down the road.

You can see where we’re going with this. Too many adjectives will spoil your story and there are always better alternatives. In part 2, we look at which ones you should kill.